Praise for Elaine : "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 Praise for Will Self: "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.