Self, Will 1961- (William Woodward Self)

views updated

Self, Will 1961- (William Woodward Self)

PERSONAL:

Born on September 26, 1961, in London, England; son of Peter (a college professor) and Elaine (a publisher) Self; married Kate Chancellor, June 13, 1990 (divorced, 1996); married Deborah Orr (an editor), 1997; children: (first marriage) Alexia and Madeleine; (second marriage) Ivan and Luther. Education: Attended Oxford University (Christ's College and Exeter College), 1979-92, received M.A. (with honors).

ADDRESSES:

Agent—The Wylie Agency Ltd, 17 Bedford Sq., London WC1B 3JA, England.

CAREER:

Writer, columnist, and cartoonist. Worked as a clerk and a laborer then as a cartoonist for the New Statesman and City Limits, a London listings magazine.

AWARDS, HONORS:

John Llewellyn Rhys Prize shortlist, 1991; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1992, for The Quantity Theory of Insanity; voted one of twenty best young British writers in Granta, 1993; Booker Prize, 2002, for An Imitation.

WRITINGS:

The Quantity Theory of Insanity (short stories), Bloomsbury (London, England), 1991, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Cock and Bull (two novellas), Atlantic Monthly Press (London, England), 1992.

My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale (novel), Bloomsbury (London, England), 1993, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Grey Area and Other Stories, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1994.

Junk Mail (collected journalism), Bloomsbury (London, England), 1995.

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (novel), illustrations by Martin Rowson, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1996, Grove Press (New York, NY), 1999.

A Story for Europe, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1996.

Great Apes, Grove Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (short stories), Grove Press (New York, NY), 1999.

How the Dead Live, Grove Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Perfidious Man (nonfiction), Viking (London, England), 2000.

(With Stephen Levinson) Antony Gormley: Some of the Facts, Tate Gallery (London, England), 2001.

Feeding Frenzy (collected journalism), Penguin (New York, NY), 2002.

Dorian: An Imitation, Grove Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (short stories), Bloomsbury (London, England), 2004.

The Book of Dave, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2006.

Psychogeography, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2007.

Also author of The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz, 1995, and Sore Sites, 2000. Contributor of cartoons to periodicals, including New Statesman and City Limits, and of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Esquire, Harper's, and the Independent. Also columnist for British newspapers, including the Observer, 1995-97, the Times, 1997-99, the Independent on Sunday, 1999-2001, and the Evening Standard, 2002—.

SIDELIGHTS:

The works of Will Self are distinguished by their black humor and uncompromising themes. Self is the author of short stories, such as those collected in The Quantity Theory of Insanity and The Grey Area and Other Stories, as well as longer works of fiction, among them the two novellas that comprise Cock and Bull and the novel Dorian: An Imitation. In Vanity Fair, Zoë Heller observed that "the tone of Quantity Theory—both energetic and strangely lugubrious—was often profoundly discomfiting. And it was not difficult to guess that Self's thematic preoccupations—madness, altered states, the sinister authority of the psychiatric establishment—refracted a painful biography."

Madness is a topic that repeatedly appears within the stories included in Self's first collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. In "Ward 9," for example, an art therapist suffers a nervous breakdown and enters a mental asylum. The title story is based upon the proposition "that sanity is a finite quantity in any given social group," according to Nick Hornby in the Times Literary Supplement. Hornby pointed out that Self's stories are "full of dreary but threatening institutions," and added: "Though you wouldn't want to live in the Self universe … in the end, you are grateful that he has gone through the agonies necessary for its creation."

The novellas in Cock and Bull both concern an inexplicable metamorphosis which transforms the respective main characters into the opposite sex. In Bull one-time rugby player John Bull awakens one morning to discover that he has a vagina located behind his knee. "John Bull's behavior grows more and more feminine as he starts coping with premenstrual tension, water weight gain and hormonal ups and downs," Michiko Kakutani elaborated in the New York Times. Seeking help from his physician, Bull visits Dr. Alan Margoulies, but the doctor becomes obsessed with Bull's condition and attempts to seduce him. "Margoulies' infatuation with Bull—or, rather, his new plaything—is a witty satire on the kind of man who is obsessed with women's sex organs and ignores the rest of them," commented Rhoda Koenig in New York. Koenig also noted that "the doctor gets his comeuppance, and Bull, who also acquires feminine qualities of vulnerability, finds satisfaction in a unique homosexual relationship."

Like Bull, the protagonist of Cock also undergoes a sexual transformation. This time, Carol, a homemaker, grows a penis and develops increasingly masculine traits. She begins to dominate her alcoholic husband and eventually, according to Julie Wheelwright in the New Statesman, "enacts a rape as revenge for her husband's sexual ineptitude." Kakutani pointed out the perceived "blatant sexism" of the novella, writing that, "In Cock, we learn that the woman who stands up for herself relinquishes her femininity and literally turns into a man, in Carol's case a particularly foul-minded man filled with homicidal rage." However, Wheelright maintained that the altered sex organs of Bull and Carol "appear as satirical metaphors of liberation." Self explained in Vanity Fair that he wrote Cock and Bull to voice his "anger at the way gender-based sexuality is so predetermined, the way we fit into our sex roles as surely as if we had cut them off the back of a cereal packet and pasted them onto ourselves."

In 1993 Self issued his first full-length novel, My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale. The story is about Ian Wharton, who chooses people at random to kill and mutilate in grotesque ways. Except for his past mentor, Samuel Northcliffe, no one suspects Ian of committing such heinous crimes. Will Blythe commented in Esquire that this "impressively deranged" book "belongs to a whole new genre devoted to the psycho killer and the severed limb." Blythe also noted: "Self's extraordinary novel is an allegory of diseased consciousness, a parable for a decade when what trickled down was not money but scorn for those without it." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Self a "master of the grotesque" whose book uses "vivid, jarringly unsavory imagery, richly erudite diction and a persuasive, engaging narrative voice."

In Self's Great Apes London artist Simon Dykes wakes up in a world inhabited by chimpanzees. Although he notices that he too seems to be turning into a chimpanzee, his denial lands him in a mental institution. Dykes' therapist is Dr. Zack Busner, a maverick researcher who takes his most intriguing cases onto talk shows. Barbara Hoffert in the Library Journal noted that while Self "can be very funny," the novel as a whole is not persuasive, partly due to the author's extensive use of profanity and focus on sex. Although Gary Krist admitted in the New York Times Book Review that Great Apes is not "a book that will delight everyone," he deemed it Self's "most satisfying book so far." In Booklist, Bonnie Smothers compared Self's satire to the work of Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift, adding that this novel "hypnotizes with its comic romps, existential posturings, and Shakespearean intrigues." A Kirkus Reviews contributor described Great Apes as "vividly imagined, extraordinarily credible, provocative and entertaining in equal measure."

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis satirizes London's media establishment. Richard Hermes is a new arrival in that milieu, and he is quickly drawn into the cocaine-driven, oversexed heart of it all. It does not take long for Hermes to go "from media hack to media whore," as Veronica Scrol put it in Booklist. Although he is in love with a woman named Ursula Bently, he winds up sleeping with a hateful but powerful man named Bell, a newspaper columnist and talk-show host on radio and television. Critiquing the book for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Brian Budzynski commented that "Self's body of work is perhaps best termed as idiosyncratic; its rendering of the unusual and perverted as familiar and attractive is wonderful. In this sense, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis is nothing short of incredible."

Self drew comparisons with the satirist Jonathan Swift upon publication of his novel How the Dead Live. Both authors share a "misanthropic side" and make use of "outlandish scenarios," noted Bonnie Smothers in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented on the book: "Running on a vatic rage that is almost Swiftian in the totality of its object—the damned human condition—it sweeps across the charnel-fields of contemporary existence." As the title suggests, Self concerns himself here with death. The main character, Lily Bloom, is shown in various states of death and dying throughout the tale. Self uses Lily's marginal position to offer unique perspective on a culture that is centered on desire. Bonnie Smothers remarked in Booklist: "The satire is biting, even cruel, but like most well-conceived satire, it offers rich food for thought."

In Dorian Self updates the classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, by nineteenth-century Irish writer Oscar Wilde, bringing the story of London's decadent underworld into the late years of the twentieth century. In Self's version, Dorian is a young man whose naked body is featured on an art installation titled "Cathode Narcissus." As the years pass by, Dorian's image on the screens degrades, while he somehow seems to escape the HIV-AIDS epidemic, despite his risky sexual habits and intravenous drug use. Dorian's story is entwined with that of Princess Diana, from the time of her marriage until her death in an automobile accident in Paris. Helen Elliott, a reviewer for the Weekend Australian, found Dorian to be "a hurtling, fascinating and dangerously amusing novel." Elliiott added that "there's an infuriating epilogue that makes you wonder at everything you've just read." Reflecting on the surprising twist at the book's end, Neil Bartlett remarked in a review for the Guardian: "Self's reincarnation of Dorian has taken the fag ends of both an English century and an English myth and given them new, troubling and hugely entertaining life."

Grey Area and Other Stories is a collection of nine short stories that depict the lives of people whose environments are so dull and meaningless that they escape into complex inner worlds. Self demonstrates that the distinctions between sanity and insanity are not always perfectly clear. Booklist contributor Janet St. John called Self a "caustic yet competent critic of society," noting that in these stories the "commonplace becomes awkward and surreal, allowing revelations and fresh insight to surface." In New Statesman and Society, Mary Scott commented: "Self's talent, like that of the best crime writers, is to drop … the clues that would enable us to reach his conclusions for ourselves—if we had his gift."

Junk Mail is a 1995 collection of Self's contributions to periodicals. Many of the entries are profile pieces, including an article on singer Marianne Faithfull and another on the vandalizing of Oscar Wilde's statue in London. The author also writes about his own life. "Self is at his cantankerously witty best when pondering his own sexual ambivalence and his parents' open marriage," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Allison Block, writing in Booklist, noted that the author "skillfully skewers politics and popular culture."

In his short-story collection Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Self writes about addicts, yuppies, and potential murderers, such as the two addicts in "The Nonce Prize" who fantasize about abducting and murdering a young boy. Bonnie Sommers, writing in Booklist, called the author a "fine creative writer," who "does not hesitate to challenge a reader's sense of self-worth." Brenda Maddox wrote in the New Statesman: "Overall, Self has turned out a hilarious collection, with the requisite touch of disorientation."

Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe features short stories, including the title story in which Dr. Mukti carries on either a disturbingly real or pathologically imaginary feud with another doctor. In another story, a mental patient believes he is a chimpanzee. Commenting on a story about children saddled with their depressed father on an outing, New Statesman contributor Hugo Barnacle wrote that the "children are portrayed with anthropological exactness."

The Book of Dave, Self's 2006 novel, has received widespread critical praise, such as a New York contributor's comment that the author "breathes life into … [a] grim and compelling" story. The satire depicts a post-apocalyptic world in which the only writings that remain are those of Dave, a bitter, divorced cabdriver who spewed forth his anguished soul in a memoir before he died in the apocalypse. As a result, survivors 500 hundred years after Dave's demise set out to fulfill Dave's vision of a parochial world where men and women live apart and children spend alternate weeks with mummy or daddy. Much of the story is told in the language of "Mokni … cockney spelled on the page phonetically, with peekaboo umlauts and neologistic pepper spray," as noted by John Leonard in Harper's. Leonard went on to write: "The satirist Will Self has upped his ante from Monty Python to Jonathan Swift, and gone straight to brilliant hell." "The Book of Dave bears all the hallmarks of Self's earlier work—the satirical eye for contemporary, urban neuroses, the show-off leaps of absurd logic, the gleeful scorn for authority and the exuberant use of language," wrote Michael Brunton in Time International. Jonathan Dee, writing in Harper's, commented that the author "spritzes this philosophical sci-fi mystery with acid humor." Reviewers also directly addressed the target of Self's satire. "This is as rousing an indictment of organized religion—and especially fundamentalism—as readers are likely to encounter in the post-9/11 canon," wrote Frank Sennett in Booklist.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 207: British Novelists since 1960, Third Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, March 4, 2003, David Bahr, review of Dorian: An Imitation, p. 74.

Atlantic, March, 2003, review of Dorian, p. 111.

Best Life, November, 2006, review of The Book of Dave, p. 58.

Booklist, December 1, 1995, Janet St. John, review of Grey Area and Other Stories, p. 609; August, 1997, Bonnie Smothers, review of Great Apes, p. 1881; April 1, 1999, Bonnie Smothers, review of Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, p. 1387; August, 1999, Veronica Scrol, review of The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, p. 2029; August, 2000, Bonnie Smothers, review of How the Dead Live, p. 2113; December 1, 2002, Frank Caso, review of Dorian, p. 648; June 1, 2006, Allison Block, review of Junk Mail, p. 21; September 1, 2006, Frank Sennett, review of The Book of Dave, p. 59.

Christianity Today, November, 2006, John Wilson, review of The Book of Dave, p. 100.

Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia), December 21, 2002, Craig Boland, review of Dorian, p. 72.

Economist, July 15, 2000, review of How the Dead Live, p. 13.

Entertainment Weekly, May 28, 1999, Megan Harlan, review of Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, p. 138; November 17, 2006, Gilbert Cruz, review of The Book of Dave, p. 132.

Esquire, April, 1994, Will Blythe, review of My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale, p. 164.

Gentleman's Quarterly, June, 1999, Thomas Mallon, "Self-made World," p. 134.

Guardian, September 21, 2002, Neil Bartlett, review of Dorian, p. 26; July 5, 2003, Will Self, "It's a Wild, Wilde World," p. 31.

Harper's, April, 2005, Jonathan Dee, review of Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, p. 87; December, 2006, John Leonard, review of The Book of Dave, p. 85.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1997, review of Great Apes, p. 979; August 1, 2006, review of The Book of Dave, p. 749.

Library Journal, October 1, 1997, Barbara Hoffert, review of Great Apes, p. 126; May 1, 1999, Joshua Cohen, review of Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, p. 115; November 15, 2002, David W. Henderson, review of Dorian, p. 103; July 1, 2006, Joshua Cohen, review of The Book of Dave, p. 72.

New Statesman, October 30, 1992, Julie Wheelwright, review of Cock and Bull, p. 35; May 1, 1998, Brenda Maddox, review of Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, p. 55; December 18, 2000, review of Perfidious Man, p. 54; January 19, 2004, Hugo Barnacle, review of Dr Mukti and other Tales of Woe, p. 53; June 19, 2006, Christopher Bray, review of The Book of Dave, p. 66.

New Statesman & Society, November 25, 1994, Mary Scott, review of Grey Area and Other Stories, p. 41.

New York, May 17, 1993, Rhoda Koenig, review of Cock and Bull, p. 87; November 20, 2006, review of The Book of Dave, p. 80.

New York Times, May 31, 1993, Michiko Kakutani, review of Cock and Bull, p. 14(N), p. 20(L); June 3, 1994, Michiko Kakutani, review of My Idea of Fun, p. C24; September 12, 1997, Michiko Kakutani, review of Great Apes, p. C31; January 5, 2003, Sophie Harrison, review of Dorian, p. 6.

New York Times Book Review, September 21, 1997, Gary Krist, review of Great Apes, p. 7; June 20, 1999, Jonathan Lethem, review of Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, p. 9; September 19, 1999, Laura Miller, review of The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, p. 11; October 8, 2000, review of How the Dead Live, p. 8; January 5, 2003, Sophie Harrison, review of Dorian, p. 6; June 11, 2006, Mark Costello, review of Junk Mail, p. 13; Nov 12, 2006, Nathaniel Rich, review of The Book of Dave, p. 52.

Observer (London, England), September 29, 2002, Jonathan Heawood, review of Dorian, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly, February 7, 1994, review of My Idea of Fun, p. 6; July 14, 1997, review of Great Apes, p. 63; September 8, 1997, Anna Henchman, "Will Self: An Enfant Terrible Comes of Age," p. 52; March 1, 1999, review of Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, p. 58; July 19, 1999, review of The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, p. 182; July 31, 2000, review of How the Dead Live, p. 69; September 29, 2002, Robert McCrum, interview with Self, p. 15; January 6, 2003, review of Dorian, p. 38; April 17, 2006, review of Junk Mail, p. 181; June 19, 2006, review of The Book of Dave, p. 38.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1998, Paul Maliszewski, review of Great Apes, p. 238; fall, 1999, Paul Maliszewski, review of Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, p. 177; spring, 2000, Brian Budzynski, review of The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, p. 191.

Seattle Times, February 9, 2003, John Freeman, review of Dorian, p. L8.

Spectator, June 10, 2006, Philip Hensher, review of The Book of Dave.

Time International, July 10, 2006, Michael Brunton, review of The Book of Dave, p. 48.

Times Literary Supplement, December 20, 1991, Nick Hornby, review of The Quantity Theory of Insanity, p. 25.

Vanity Fair, June, 1993, Zoë Heller, "Self Examination," pp. 125-127, 148-151.

Weekend Australian, January 11, 2003, Helen Elliott, review of Dorian, p. B9.

Weekly Standard, December 25, 2006, Daniel Sullivan, review of The Book of Dave.