Self indulgent
Memoirist takes penchant for erratic trips to the extreme
Will: A Memoir Will Self
Grove The British novelist Will Self once wrote that to immerse yourself in the pages of Georges Bataille is to encounter a style so radical as to give the impression you are drunk at the wheel. This quality has also characterized Self’s work — both in his early (and most successful) literary excursions and in the compositions he has produced since 2012’s Umbrella, the inaugural volume of a trilogy that has threatened to turn his penchant for enjoyably erratic journeys into something close to a car crash.
Will, Self’s new memoir about his various youthful addictions, suggests the car has finally left the road, fallen apart and burst into flames. The narrative of the book, vexingly cast in the third person, is episodic, freewheeling and associative. It’s also marked by a weakness for supposedly ironic clichés, irritatingly portentous ellipses, the repetition of advice bequeathed to him by his mother and a clumsy habit of attempting to lend his story temporal texture by deploying allusions to contemporary music and culture. It is also self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing and pyrotechnically mean-spirited.
Self’s narrative consists of five parts, each set in a period that corresponds to a discrete stage of his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Our first encounter arrives in the form of a ludicrously protracted account of Self lurching and trembling his way around London, in an acute state of withdrawal, on a May morning in 1986. His objective? To persuade a friend to give him heroin in exchange for the only thing he has — a couple of pastries. We then join him in May 1979, at which point he is already getting himself into putatively endearing scrapes and, because he is apparently too bright to need to study for the Oxford entrance exams, developing a “consuming interest” in all manner of narcotics.
Later the clock shifts again, and we are back in 1986, as Self is about to enter a drying-out clinic in an English seaside town. He heroically attempts to alleviate his boredom and disgust with his environment by engaging in backto-back marathons of masturbation, all the while disparaging the treatment he is receiving and the company of the “thickos” with whom he is made to associate.
None of this is particularly easy to take, even when one allows for the mixture of self-pity, delusion, grandiosity and desperation that typifies the behaviour of addicts. And it would be unfair to suggest that Self attempts to exonerate himself from these charges — our pity, reader, he does not seek.
There moments of charm, even pathos. But on the whole, this is a memoir of substance abuse and self-harm that fails to generate the sympathy, empathy or interest that one customarily associates with the genre. Time in Self’s company leaves you feeling not that you are thrillingly, if figuratively, drunk at the wheel, but slumped, comatose, over the prison of your desk.