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A review by brice_mo
Elaine by Will Self
1.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press for the ARC!
Will Self’s Elaine is a colossal and forceful misstep—a textbook example of authorial self-indulgence that seems to loathe both its subject and its audience. It's one of the rare pieces of writing where I can't find anything good to say about it.
In this “auto-oedipal fiction” (okay, gag), Self draws from his mother’s private diaries to craft a story about sexual frustration in the life of a 1950s housewife. It’s definitely a worthy subject for a novel, but its execution is egregious.
Any book written by a man “from a woman’s perspective” should cause the reader to pause, but this spirals immediately into bad taste, showcasing a protagonist that only avoids being a manic pixie dream girl by aging out of it. Self replaces that trope’s fixation on effortless cool with an insistence that women actually can be pretty deep. Elaineargues for female complexity with such fervor that it becomes reductionist—the author seemingly needs the titular character to earn readers’ respect, rather than just assuming she deserves it. This gets even grosser when one considers that at least some of the novel’s thoughts originate from the author’s mother, yet he feels entitled to mediate them through his own lens and for his own purposes.
Furthermore, the prose is insufferable. Elaine is one of the most grating, overwrought things I’ve read in a while, and I say that as someone who loves writing that flirts with the poetic. I love elevated language. I love academic opaqueness. I love when I need to look up a word. The problem is that Self wields his lexicon like a blunt instrument, forcibly bludgeoning the reader in almost every line. As an example, consider this early sentence:
“Despite the tubular dress and the lampshade coiffure, young Genevieve appeared simultaneously gamine, nubile . . . and intelligent.”
Aside from the fact that the word “nubile” should be placed on the literary equivalent of a no-fly list, this sentence also reflects how Self’s writing style never finds a rhythm that balances its dense peaks with approachable valleys. It’s always turned to 11 and often incomprehensible in its desperation to sound bookish—the print equivalent of a podcast bro.
By the end of Elaine, I just wasn't sure of who was meant to read the book other than its author, and I think that's a problem.
Good writing may start for oneself, but I'm not sure it can successfully end there.
Will Self’s Elaine is a colossal and forceful misstep—a textbook example of authorial self-indulgence that seems to loathe both its subject and its audience. It's one of the rare pieces of writing where I can't find anything good to say about it.
In this “auto-oedipal fiction” (okay, gag), Self draws from his mother’s private diaries to craft a story about sexual frustration in the life of a 1950s housewife. It’s definitely a worthy subject for a novel, but its execution is egregious.
Any book written by a man “from a woman’s perspective” should cause the reader to pause, but this spirals immediately into bad taste, showcasing a protagonist that only avoids being a manic pixie dream girl by aging out of it. Self replaces that trope’s fixation on effortless cool with an insistence that women actually can be pretty deep. Elaineargues for female complexity with such fervor that it becomes reductionist—the author seemingly needs the titular character to earn readers’ respect, rather than just assuming she deserves it. This gets even grosser when one considers that at least some of the novel’s thoughts originate from the author’s mother, yet he feels entitled to mediate them through his own lens and for his own purposes.
Furthermore, the prose is insufferable. Elaine is one of the most grating, overwrought things I’ve read in a while, and I say that as someone who loves writing that flirts with the poetic. I love elevated language. I love academic opaqueness. I love when I need to look up a word. The problem is that Self wields his lexicon like a blunt instrument, forcibly bludgeoning the reader in almost every line. As an example, consider this early sentence:
“Despite the tubular dress and the lampshade coiffure, young Genevieve appeared simultaneously gamine, nubile . . . and intelligent.”
Aside from the fact that the word “nubile” should be placed on the literary equivalent of a no-fly list, this sentence also reflects how Self’s writing style never finds a rhythm that balances its dense peaks with approachable valleys. It’s always turned to 11 and often incomprehensible in its desperation to sound bookish—the print equivalent of a podcast bro.
By the end of Elaine, I just wasn't sure of who was meant to read the book other than its author, and I think that's a problem.
Good writing may start for oneself, but I'm not sure it can successfully end there.