More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed

Inspired by his late mother’s diaries, Will Self’s fictionalised Elaine covers just over a year in the life of its titular character. Elaine Hancock is a trailing wife living in upstate New York, where her husband, John, teaches English at Cornell.

It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life. But Will Self is no stranger to outrageousness

Zigzagging chronologically, the novel takes place in the mid-1950s – more than a decade before Self lived in Ithaca with his parents, who then separated. He portrays it as a loose time at the faculty: the Hancocks display a ‘masochistic intimacy’ by swapping notes about the people they’ve drunkenly ‘necked’ during evenings out. Disdainful of her husband (‘a milquetoast man who doesn’t know how to make love properly’), Elaine flirts with extramarital affairs but mostly indulges in a rich fantasy life. She tends to fall for ‘difficult, screwy guys’, and when rebuffed ‘[dogs] these men’s footsteps as they try to escape her clutches’.

Elaine assists John, who is gunning for promotion and a Fulbright, by typing and editing his manuscripts on Milton. Having studied under Ted Roethke at Penn State, she also aspires to write, but considers her work ‘nonviable… as some obstetrician might say of an embryo’. She asks for advice from Vladimir Nabokov, who makes a cameo appearance on campus. The ‘balding old coot’, as Elaine refers to him, suggests she ‘paint the bars of [her] own cage’. Instead, she burns her journals and finds herself hemmed in by housework. ‘Is this it?’ she howls aloud.

Elaine suffers from migraines and ‘postpartum neurosis’, which manifests as panic attacks that psychoanalysis has failed to cure. Her erratic moods sometimes culminate in violence towards her son, filling her with shame. ‘On the verge of girl-hating puberty,’ Billy – an only child in the book – is precocious. The nickname variant at least precludes ‘Little Willy’, as Self’s mother called him growing up. But Billy’s personality tracks with the author’s Eeyorish persona:

He returned from his first day in first grade to solemnly announce that the sign on the classroom door read COME ON IN EVERYONE AND LET’S HAVE FUN. The disgust with which Fun had been uttered was complete.

We have previously met versions of Self’s mother, a New York transplant née Elaine Rosenbloom, on the page: first in the short story ‘The North London Book of the Dead’, written soon after her death in 1988. Self also mined her diaries for his novel How the Dead Live, which featured a Jewish mother replaying memories, including her sexual escapades, posthumously. In addition to the marital plotline, Elaine touches upon the anti-Semitism and racism of the era. Elaine, who considers being Jewish ‘altogether a cosmic embarrassment’, ‘passes’, while her darker-skinned brother Robert ‘closely resembles a cigar-store Indian’, she notes. John, meanwhile, was born Johann Schitz, but changed his name when he joined the army, as ‘having a Kraut name wasn’t going to look good once brave boys began dying’. Elaine had ‘supported him – after all, she, too, was keen on hiding in plain view’.

It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life, real or imagined. But Self is no stranger to outrageousness. Previous fictional flights of fancy include a woman sprouting a penis and a man a vagina behind his knee (Cock & Bull); a Kafkaesque London populated by exhibitionist apes (Great Apes); and a future dystopia ruled by the dispatches of a disgruntled cabbie (The Book of Dave). Billed as ‘perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction’, Elaine pushes provocation a step further. For readers who find themselves queasy when an author refers to his mother’s vulva being ‘grabbed at’ or a lover’s ‘fingers on her mons, his thumb in her vagina’, here’s hoping it’s also the last.

The book’s greatest offences, however, are not sexual but stylistic. Self’s maximalism has not aged well. While he’s reined in recurrent tics (I spotted only one ‘again-annagain’ and not a single ‘annaround’ this time around), his unwavering adoration of the thesaurus fails to elevate his prose. Like his 2019 addiction memoir Will, this book is littered with italics and arbitrary ellipses. Elaine wonders: ‘Can it be… that the acme of success… for me… is being able… to do my job as a housekeeper?’ They appear in his modernist novels – Umbrella, Shark and Phone – as well, but italics and ellipses were better suited to the trilogy’s cultural references and stream-of-consciousness, respectively.

Self’s fiction occasionally arrives at characterisation by way of accretion, but Elaine’s interiority never quite coalesces. Whereas Will was (annoyingly) told in the third person, Elaine (even more annoyingly) mixes third- and first-person, sometimes switching mid-sentence: ‘Elaine has cast pen and exercise book aside on several occasions and… pleasured myself.’ Even the sex scenes fail to titillate – despite an adulterous plot twist, the novel is more an arm’s-length portrait of a woman on the verge than a good old-fashioned Updikean frolic.

‘I don’t really write for readers,’ Self once admitted to the Guardian. In Elaine, he makes that abundantly clear.