Author Will lives down to his own Self-image

THE interview started well enough. Novelist Will Self seemed to have the mood music right, telling the London ‘Times’ that men like him – Oxfordeducated, white, straight, middle-class, and middle-aged – needed to pipe down a bit in the wake of the MeToo movement.

“Frankly,” he said, “I don’t have a lot of sympathy for white, middle-class men who are unable to question their position in the social sphere.”

Unfortunately, Will went and blew it almost immediately, by piping straight back up to dismiss Bookerprize nominated Sally Rooney’s writing as “simple-minded”.

Which is fair enough, but he was happy to admit that he’d reached this damning conclusion having read just “a few pages” of the Irish author’s book.

“It may say things that millennials want to hear reflected back at them, but it’s very simple stuff with no literary ambition that I can see,” he sniffed, sounding very much like a white, middle-class man who was unable to question his position in the social sphere.

Was Will winding us up? He may well have been – he was doing the interview as part of a campaign to promote Chinese new year fortune macarons at a London restaurant, the scripts of which he had apparently written.

I don’t think the uniquely talented Sally Rooney will be losing much sleep over it either way.