Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” by The Guardian. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it?
As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril. Based on the intimate diaries Self’s mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm: a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, employing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.
“An unvarnished, irreverent, logical extension of Self’s oeuvre.”—Elisabeth Egan, New York Times
“Extraordinary . . . In exposing all the dirtiest laundry of his mother’s psyche, Self has perversely elevated and honoured her. Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity.”—Sandra Newman, The Guardian
“A remarkable period piece borne out of current preoccupations with dismantling the patriarchy . . . In magnifying her voice so we too can hear her screams across the decades, Elaine is a son’s spectacular attempt to give his mother the agency and freedom she was denied.”—Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph
“For Self to turn to autofiction now, one might assume that Elaine can be read in part as a critique of the category itself; whichever genre he tackles, Self always goes in with both boots . . . What drives the novel forward, then, is the compound impact of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object—the screech of gears, the howls of protest—over and over again. The now-humdrum tropes of autofiction are present in Elaine, but they are also amusingly subverted . . . The pleasure of reading his prose is both unchanged and, one imagines, the same pleasure he derives when composing it: a full-blooded Nabokovian relish for the possibilities of the sentence, the phrase, the word. This is not just Self’s idea of fun, it is his modus operandi.”—Andy Miller, Washington Post
“Self has been drawing the bars of the cage in iridescent and crepuscular ways throughout his career. Here, he makes you weep at the confines.”—Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
“It’s an interesting move for Self to dive into the feminine. This he does with immense empathy and success . . . Self fashions a portrait, as intimate as it is intriguing, of Elaine as a clever, highly literate, troubled woman trapped within a series of metaphorical cages . . . Self is not so much an Oedipus here, but more an Orpheus, setting her life to a sort of music.”—Philip Womack, The Spectator World
“A shattering portrait of a woman trapped by her domestic responsibilities and lingering ‘postpartum neurosis’ . . . Self pulls off a painfully authentic depiction of Elaine’s interior life, doing justice to her fierce anger and sexual desire along with her fears and humiliations. This is a tour de force.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Vivid . . . A time capsule from an ugly time. As usual, Self is a word wizard.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“The provocative British novelist imagines his mother’s complex inner life . . . Self has long been an admirer of the modernists, and stylistically this novel strongly recalls Mrs. Dalloway . . . Its chief strength is as a showcase of a woman who’s had it up to here with good manners . . . A striking study of a woman on the verge.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A deft character study that balances social criticism with the strive toward personhood.”—Booklist
“Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he’s the most fascinating of the tradition’s torch bearers.”—New York
“Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel.”—Guardian
“Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it’s as if he is the first person to see anything at all.”—New York Times
“Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives . . . The reward is a strange, vivid book.”—New Yorker
“Self’s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.”—Independent
“Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self’s unrestricted writing . . . You’ll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled—and laugh your ass off.”—NPR
“Will Self’s Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . . . Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief.”—New Statesman
“Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness . . . Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion.”—New York Review of Books
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