Will

disclaimer: didn’t make it past page 150.

each section is around 2 - 5 pages in length, composed of a patchwork of i) impressionistic description, stream of consciousness, memories, sensations, ii) clichés, reported speech, memories, received wisdom and similar. all those belonging to the latter category appear in italics, as if Self is trying to establish a barrier between them and the text proper. this happens a lot, there are about five italicised words or phrases on any given page.

contemporary literary-critical discourse that polarises commercial and experimental fiction (which is not to say that the overwhelming majority of publicised, reviewed and canonised work is very formally narrow) has had me thinking about what it means to write in a self-consciously experimental way for a while lately.

Speaking from the highly attenuated perspective of the Anglosphere, Will Self looks as though he will be the last writer with some standing to publicly declare that he was embarking on an ambitious literary project with formal difference at its core. His reason for adopting High Modernism á la Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, Pound and Woolf as a lodestar was paradoxically quite conservative, i.e. modernism was the last basis on which one could formulate a new literary classicism. Fittingly, Self did not break out of his spirit of imitation to achieve anything I’d really recommend. I don’t think this is because he’s a bad writer, though he seems unable to reign his prose is at all, but primarily because it lacked any sense of a new that modernism’s effects depend on, a sense that these works spoke to transformative events and technologies resonating on the level of culture.

Achieving a recognisably experimental form and constructing a work around it is certainly admirable but when it takes on the character of a logic isolated from anything galvanising on the level of content I find myself not very impressed.

perhaps I’m a philistine or insufficiently Deleuzian to appreciate aesthetic repetition, or a traditionalist for wanting a broader referent, some depth of vision as you’d get in Mark E. Smith’s lyrics or promise of transcendence as in, I don’t know, techno, here it’s just indulgence or stuff in need of an editor.

One part of me thinks Will Self is an absolutely astounding writer and another thinks he's an overrated, solipsistic, far-too wordy, gaudy, show-offy and wasted talent.

This is what I guess constitutes the first part of more than one of his autobiographical books. None may follow, but this one covers his earlier years throughout addiction.

He references William S. Burroughs enough times to make me think he not only wanted to write this book as though he actually were Burroughs—which would be strange, as Burroughs himself wrote quite a number of autobiographical books in the midst of addiction—but then again, the book is so Self-ishly (pun intended) written that it's impossible to know.

The result is a book that is written by an intelligent and acutely self-aware author. Self has created a book that delves into how people can act when in the throes of addiction. I guess many readers can loathe his experimental style plus the fact that the entire book is written in the third person:

The May morning sunlight detonates against 1916’s façade, and its diamond-shaped windowpanes . . . explode. Will senses the build-up of commuter traffic behind him, as the cars, trucks and vans hump along the Clapham Road towards the city centre: a steely testudo, ever forming, dispersing and re-forming. Will thinks of the desperate manoeuvre he pulled off on the way from Kensington: ‘You coulda fucking killed yourself . . . No, really, you could’ve . . .’

Will’s fond of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim: God invented sex in order to place Man in embarrassing positions – yet none, surely, are as shameful as his own, for he lurches across town, hobbled by his half-masted trousers and underpants, from one impulsive liaison to the next.

Self is currently quite sober, and as such, he's delved into a domain that I feel is always a pain for writers: soberly trying to describe the feeling of being intoxicated. While I think Self pulls it off for most of the time, his "psychogeography"—a word he uses often—seemingly can't dissuade him from adding difficult words while creating a solipsistic world that the addict is almost always in.

I feel that writers like William S. Burroughs and Alan Moore have handled descriptions of mayhem and debauchery far better than Self has, mainly due to my personal dislike of Self's style in this book. Sure, the made-up words and stylistic slurs probably describe how Self felt at the time, but grate on me; I wish he'd have tightened-up and hence produced a more effervescent look back. I'm quite sure Self knows what he's doing.

This book was very easy to read, which made me wonder what's wrong with me; ultimately, Self's style is quite easily digested if one is able to circumvent all the trappings, of which there are quite a few. I can't say I enjoyed this book, nor that I will remember it fondly, but it's an interesting look into the current mind of an intelligent person who was a massive drug addict a couple of decades ago.

One part of me thinks Will Self is an absolutely astounding writer and another thinks he's an overrated, solipsistic, far-too wordy, gaudy, show-offy and wasted talent.

This is what I guess constitutes the first part of more than one of his autobiographical books. None may follow, but this one covers his earlier years throughout addiction.

He references William S. Burroughs enough times to make me think he not only wanted to write this book as though he actually were Burroughs—which would be strange, as Burroughs himself wrote quite a number of autobiographical books in the midst of addiction—but then again, the book is so Self-ishly (pun intended) written that it's impossible to know.

The result is a book that is written by an intelligent and acutely self-aware author. Self has created a book that delves into how people can act when in the throes of addiction. I guess many readers can loathe his experimental style plus the fact that the entire book is written in the third person:

The May morning sunlight detonates against 1916’s façade, and its diamond-shaped windowpanes . . . explode. Will senses the build-up of commuter traffic behind him, as the cars, trucks and vans hump along the Clapham Road towards the city centre: a steely testudo, ever forming, dispersing and re-forming. Will thinks of the desperate manoeuvre he pulled off on the way from Kensington: ‘You coulda fucking killed yourself . . . No, really, you could’ve . . .’

Will’s fond of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim: God invented sex in order to place Man in embarrassing positions – yet none, surely, are as shameful as his own, for he lurches across town, hobbled by his half-masted trousers and underpants, from one impulsive liaison to the next.

Self is currently quite sober, and as such, he's delved into a domain that I feel is always a pain for writers: soberly trying to describe the feeling of being intoxicated. While I think Self pulls it off for most of the time, his "psychogeography"—a word he uses often—seemingly can't dissuade him from adding difficult words while creating a solipsistic world that the addict is almost always in.

I feel that writers like William S. Burroughs and Alan Moore have handled descriptions of mayhem and debauchery far better than Self has, mainly due to my personal dislike of Self's style in this book. Sure, the made-up words and stylistic slurs probably describe how Self felt at the time, but grate on me; I wish he'd have tightened-up and hence produced a more effervescent look back. I'm quite sure Self knows what he's doing.

This book was very easy to read, which made me wonder what's wrong with me; ultimately, Self's style is quite easily digested if one is able to circumvent all the trappings, of which there are quite a few. I can't say I enjoyed this book, nor that I will remember it fondly, but it's an interesting look into the current mind of an intelligent person who was a massive drug addict a couple of decades ago.