Elaine

by Will Self

The Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella writes his most American novel yet—a brilliant portrait of a 1950s housewife, based on the life of the author’s mother, and an exploration of sexual freedom and sublimated desire, set between the dining halls of Cornell University and the raucous parties of midcentury New York City

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” by The Guardian. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine.

Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders...is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life. Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, 21st Century, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, British Literature

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 2024

About the author

William Self is an English novelist, reviewer and columnist. He received his education at University College School, Christ's College Finchley, and Exeter College, Oxford. He was married to the late journalist Deborah Orr.

Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Will Self is undeniably an elegant stylist, I find this book almost unreadable. And likely, won't finish it.

Elaine, a novel based on the author's mother's diaries, starts off strong, with Elaine asking herself, or the world, "Is this fucking IT?!?!" and realizing that if she wants to be successful in her life, she has to be a good homemaker, paralyzed by the claustrophobia and the emptiness and loneliness she finds there.

But it didn't take long for me to find myself lost in pages and pages and pages of thought and haphazard remembrances/backstory, over a hundred pages and not one dramatized action. This is solipsistic to the extreme. So it doesn't matter much to me that the sentences ARE elegant, the language precise. Since I'm trapped in this woman's brain, and nothing is actually happening, my enjoyment level is quite low indeed. Sadly.

Also, while the fact that this narrative is based on his mother's diaries makes the story infinitely more interesting, it's also a fact that makes it infinitely more disturbing. I find it beyond strange that Self focuses so much on his mother's menstruation cycle and migraines, in addition to her sexuality (she's chronically unfaithful to his father). The stained Kotex, the lamenting of having "the curse" when she's on the prowl for sex, it seems to me this book is rife with the author's mommy issues.

I'm currently over halfway through it and finally something is actually happening: Elaine is at a party (so she's drinking, and she's on the toilet - she's got her period!! surprise surprise - and talking to people) but I'm just not all that invested in what may or (more likely) may not happen next, so it's doubtful I will continue. A shame, I was really interested and hopeful about this one.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most definitely not for me. The star is for me though- because I finished it.

This novel is based on diaries that Will Self's mother kept. I think I'd have kept them to myself.

The "story" is negligible. Elaine is a bored housewife who, it appears, has had affairs previously in her marriage. She seems to find everything dull except for her brilliant son, Billy (I wonder who that is?) She virtually throws herself at a man who flirts with everyone and cons herself into believing that he desires her too.

However the truth is that the object of her desire -Ted - is just as dull as she is.

My problems with this book began almost immediately with the style. There are myriad ellipses and phrases in italics- neither of which I can fathom the reason for.

The last time I tried to read a Will Self book I gave up and I wish I had done this time. There are lots of clever literary devices, Latin, rarely used words etc presumably to demonstrate how very clever Will Self is. I've seen the man interviewed - he's funny and witty - I just wish he'd applied some of that to this dull book that is merely about an affair.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for the advance review copy.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elaine is Self’s return to fiction following the career-pinnacle modernist trilogy Umbrella, Shark, and Phone, and continues the turn inward taken in his novelistic memoir Will. Having lamented the death of the novel on previous occasions and the relegation of reading to niche pursuit status à la playing the lute, it was unclear whether Self had faith in the novel form . . . now we have our answer. In Elaine, Self uses his mother Elaine Rosenbloom’s diaries to create a fictionalised account of an extramarital affair she had in the 1950s with a boilerplate adulterous Jock. Taking place in the staid and quietly sexual milieu of Cornell University, featuring cameos from Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, the novel serves up a mordant third-person portrait of a self-loathing woman caught in a passionless marriage, with no coherent throughline for her own artistic ambition. Self uses direct phrases and lines from the diaries in italicised snippets to bring us closer to Elaine, however, the overwhelming sardonicism of Self’s narration keeps the character always out of reach, making her something of an infuriating and insipid marionette in a tawdry Oedipal psychodrama. Propelled along by Self’s frenetic prose style that recalls the caustic humour of his earlier work, Elaine is an involving and stylish novel, let down by the sheer banality of the story and only the faint echoes of his mother’s voice that we’re permitted to hear.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.

Entry from Elaine’s diary, February, 1956

The publisher’s blurb describes Will Self’s Elaine as “Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction” as it is a heavily novelised treatment of the private diaries of Self’s own mother, Elaine. (Brief research shows that Self has a brother and was raised in London, whereas the “Billy” in this novel is an only child, raised in Ithaca, New York, etc.; this is not straight auto-fiction.) I don’t normally love when a male author writes from the female POV — and particularly in a case like this where gender-based power imbalance is the main focus — but with access to his mother’s diaries and a front row seat to her life, Self has more than usual insight into his “character’s” psyche (and the case could be made that perhaps he approaches his mother’s story with an outsider’s objectivity that has allowed him to explore her life with something like clinical detachment unavailable to other women?) Ultimately: this is a compelling story of a 1950s American housewife, thwarted in her own ambitions and suffering mental illness, who isn’t quite emotionally stable enough to endure the swinging parties of her husband’s Ivy League faculty crowd without humiliation. With elevated language, intimate psychological exploration, and unusual literary devices, Self is an obvious master of his craft; and with a mother whose story is at once both unique in its details and broadly typical of its time, this is a novel that feels both revelatory and necessary. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. ALSO: I usually put my quoteblocks in italics, but here I present them as found because Self’s use of italics is too integral to the novel for me to mess with.)

Her hysteria is mounting — and as Evelyn Tate’s screen door snaps shut, Elaine says it a third time: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able . . . to do my job as a housekeeper? Each phrase is separated by a troubled gasp — but it doesn’t matter how fast she babbles or deeply she breathes, the panic has the better of her: I’m going to collapse, she thinks, then be swept up into the sky with my goddamn nightie up around my shoulders . . . The last anyone will ever see of me is the first anyone did: my bare behind, waiting to be smacked.

Suffering from migraines and panic attacks and unresolved childhood trauma, Elaine Hancock routinely relies on her husband, John, to help care for both her and their nine-year-old son, Billy; but as even Elaine’s former therapist noted that John and Billy’s relationship was “unusually close”, Elaine is often made to feel both chained to and surplus to their family arrangement. Dreaming of being an author, Elaine fills her time alone by writing stories in her secret notebooks; but as she can tell that her writing is “worthless and banal”, Elaine burns her fiction, only hanging on to her diaries, filled with secrets and schedules and sexual fantasies. And these are sexed-up times: Between feeling disgust at her husband’s clumsy overtures and like a second-tier prize at Cornell faculty parties (where folks swap spouses for slow dances and drunken necking), Elaine is ripe to fall hard for the manly new Sociology professor when he and his glamorous wife both join the faculty; a crush that will not end well. Spanning the period of about a year, with Elaine thinking back on earlier episodes from her life, this novel explores all of the ways that society, and Elaine’s own mental fragility, conspired against her fulfilment and happiness.

That’s the plot, but as for the format, the most striking feature is Self’s use of italics:

Dressed in slacks and a sweater she descends . . . she descends, dressed in slacks and a sweater — in sweater and slacks dressed, she descends: each thought corresponds to a word or words, right? Mix ’em up and you get a wordy sorta salad, like the mess in my head . . .

In a recent(ish) interview with The Sydney Herald, Self explains that although he is a Professor of Modern Thought at Brunel University in west London, he has stopped teaching literature because, “I cannot find students that are capable of understanding what literary influence is. They simply haven’t read enough and don’t have the [required] fine grain of understanding.” So at the risk of demonstrating my own failings, I’ll share that whenever I saw these paragraphs that contain italics, I assumed they were references to other sources. I recognised some references to Steinbeck and Shakespeare, The Odyssey is gestured to beyond the setting of Ithaca, Paradise Lost beyond it being the focus of Elaine’s husband’s academic career; I felt clever when I recognised Venus in Furs. But I didn’t recognise most of the italicised bits, and while some phrases like “bitter as the cud” prove to be from poems a better read person might know (Wilson Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est), phrases like “red and scummy patches in a stainless steel kidney dish” and “a chill cold blast of sunlight” don’t have any google results. Are they simply all phrases from Elaine’s diaries, the “wordy sorta salad” that made a “mess” in her head? Whether they were the results of her own reading and study or original phrasing, that’s what I decided to go with, and it did serve to make Elaine an even more intriguing character. Having studied under the poet Ted Roethke, discussed writing with Nabokov and Bellow at faculty events, and serving an invaluable role as transcriptionist and editor for her husband’s academic writing throughout her marriage, Elaine is understandably frustrated to be entirely judged (even by herself) by her competence as a housekeeper.

Yes, she’d been unhappy — upset, often, as well. But in those far-off days of a fortnight ago, with her complaisant old man, her girlish crush on his colleague, and her catty best friend, Elaine had been a goddamn poster girl for the Modern American Woman: posed in her kitchen, skirts stiff as crinolines, smile plasticized, a penis in one hand . . . a spatula in the other.

This is the kind of novel one can imagine being taught — all those literary references tracked down by students more relentless than I in pursuit of their sources — and the type of novel that’s submitted for awards. But unlike some novels that bore or soar right over my head for the sake of being different, Self has crafted Elaine to be unique in form while totally relatable in substance. I felt I got to know his character “Elaine” (whether or not she is very faithful to the known facts of his actual mother) and hers is a story that I am glad to have been told.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 1 out of 5]

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. Elaine argues 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.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the sort of thing Self usually writes. This is based (loosely?) on diaries his mother (also called Elaine) wrote which were only found after her death.

It's a story of a frustrated housewife in 1950s attempting (and mostly failing) to initiate an affair with the husband of one of their friends.

I much prefer Self's more scabrous and experimental works. This novel is pretty straightforward. I wasn't terribly keen on the needy Elaine.

[R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fear and Loathing at the Faculty Party

Despite flaccid promotion and lukewarm reception, I grow confident with each turned page that this novel, alongside one or two others and a few stories and essays, will be what remains of Self's legacy at the close of the 21st century

It's a resuscitated Virginia Woolf wickedly ventriloquizing John Cheever- all hail the bent brow of the midcentury hausfrau, animated in the one-window attic of her own, with pen waving over (not drowning inkily into) paper waves of pages and pages, and not just a little angst in her pants (whilst reassuring herself it's just a passing phase, it'll go away).

[bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I didn’t enjoy reading this book-the writing was beautiful and I felt what the author was trying to convey. I spent time inside the thoughts of a woman trapped by the 1950s expectations of how she is expected to behave. She is outwardly doing everything she is supposed to do while inwardly going mad. It is the internal rant of someone who feels completely trapped by her circumstance. I definitely felt her pain.

[🩶 April • A.M. Flynn • 🩶]

DNF at 40%. I might come back to this one later?.. 🤔🧐

[Daniel Cushnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will's books are constantly rated critically and discussed disparagingly by people who give no indication of their familiarity with his writing and career.

I thought it was an excellent novel in the modernist style, highly immersive and funny. It's not going to be most people's cup of tea, and that's fair enough, but to act like he doesn't know what he's doing is bananas.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
"𝙎𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 𝙚𝙣𝙙 𝙞𝙣 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙧, 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙢𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙗𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙡𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙮 𝙚𝙣𝙫𝙚𝙡𝙤𝙥𝙨 𝙝𝙚𝙧-𝙢𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙗𝙚 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘐'𝘮 𝘐𝘯. "
Elaine was published in September, I did read it months prior to its release date but my life, as I keep stating, has been hectic lately. 2024 has not been kind but I need to write a review, this was a book I quoted like mad and thought, this is what a trapped woman feels like and how did the author go on a dig through his mother’s journals, and come out mostly unscathed? We know our parents as mom and dad, but do we really want to know their hidden sides? I find often our diaries are our dumping grounds, a place to purge our hectic emotions and often our ugly thoughts. I don’t know if I would want to tread too deeply into the recesses of my mother’s mind.

Elaine, throughout the entire novel, is a woman buried alive by 1950’s expectations of women, the defined gender roles. Mothers are meant to be devoted to their children, sacrificial of their needs always and faithful to their husband as second nature. It must have been a grueling reality, at least for someone as intelligent as Elaine. It didn’t take much to fall short, to be found wanting under the critical gaze of others. She will not accept servitude, come what may! She is married to an Ivy League academic who teaches at Cornell, and mother to their son Billy who needs too much attention and loves drowning her in facts. She is disenchanted being a housewife in Ithaca, New York- her home nothing short of a prison cell, or a crypt as she is “buried alive here in upstate suburbia.” Surely life is meant to amount to more than cooking, cleaning, bearing children and raising them? She feels such an existence is inglorious, how can anyone be happy with nothing to stimulate their mind, their body? Surrounded by things that must be dusted, cleaned and then we rinse and repeat. She’s been plunged into hysteria before, seen a doctor for her breakdown, with her husband’s support, if you can call it that. This life, with nothing but dirty pots and a child waiting for her. She is sick of herself, and of John, the spineless husband.

She desires other men, maybe simply for the reason they aren’t John, chasing them, even if they show indifference. Anything to feel alive, even if she believes it’s just her animal self and is disgusted by her “slutty” needs. She writes of her infidelities (real, imagined) and then burns them, because “why leave behind accounts of her desperation.” But why the shame, when John himself likely partakes in forbidden fruit?  Then there is Ted, who her husband cannot measure up to, who she fantasizes about, and records their every interaction. He is a man, he has powerful suppressed sexual desire not like her husband, who cannot satisfy her needs, who she feels she is only a vessel for.

She knows her view of the world is like the view of herself, “the whole thing is likely to explode at any minute.” All of this comes from pent up boredom, dissatisfaction, and no outlet for an intelligent, creative mind. Is it any wonder she feels miserable, suffers migraines, feels like cracking up? The necking parties, it is here that Ted Troppmann entered their circle and became a sort of obsession. Did she ever desire John, that weak, mild man who doesn’t know how to make love to her? She doesn’t desire him, he simpers, what woman wants that? Even as he helped her through her crises, she despises him. And what of poor Billy, who she cannot seem to love enough, nurture and care for right way, despite Dr. Spock and his belief mothers know what their children need. She can’t find the rhythm of this ‘natural mothering’.

She transcribes John’s work, with her biting retorts in her head. John, of ‘overbearing grossness” has the nerve to find her vulgar! Why, she thinks his inability to advance professionally is also due to his lack of sexual vigor. Domesticity is repugnant to her, akin to chains, keeping her from being somewhere more interesting than this place of void. Why is she so horrible, why can’t she just embrace her son, appreciate the present?

Surrounded by intellectuals, searching out affairs, collapsing under the weight of breakdowns, faculty parties as a cover to ‘hunt down love’ where she ends up behaving like a bitch in heat, maybe Elaine is right, in the end we are all just animals. Elaine comes off as caustic, but genuine. She is honest in a way that makes people uncomfortable, because people only like the truth when it isn’t ugly. With a husband more invested in a blind poet’s constitutional theories (his work) than his wife, who is cracking apart, who can blame her for running away with her fantasies? She betrays him with her mind, but is he loyal? Hmmm. Her girlish fantasies shame her into acting out in humiliating scenes, but they also may be the only thing that help her get through each day, a hope for something more. The writing is incredible, Elaine is a mess, or maybe she is just a woman born in the wrong time and suffering for it.

Published September 2024

Grove Atlantic

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a joy to read a novel by a writer who pays as much attention to language as Will Self.

This is a disturbing book. I kept thinking what I would think of it if I hadn't known it's the product of Self's interpretation and retelling of what he found in his late mother's diaries.

When he writes that his mother writes badly, that she can't stand herself, for how badly she writes--is that her judgment, or his? I kept being distracted by questions like this. When Will Self writes: "She has felt his tongue twine in hers, his hands on her hips and her back" do I blame Will Self, or is that an example of his mother's bad writing? (Let me add that I do think this is bad writing, tongues don't twine.)

So I ended up thinking too much about every sentence. On the other hand, I was invited and encouraged to think about every sentence, and it's maybe even true that my head was held in place, and I was forced to look at every sentence. This is a claustrophobic story, told with uncomfortable intimacy, and I guess that is the point. A story fashioned by and inspired by the diaries of an woman with an imprisoned mind, and who wrote thoughts warped by misogyny and self-loathing, and the fact that I couldn't tell what were thoughts coming from a real person who suffered, and what were thoughts filtered through the memory and imagination of her son, was disturbing.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In some ways this is a companion to WS's earlier novel How the Dead Live - another story of death-in-life as it affects a woman not unlike his late Mother. Only this time, no phantasmagoria is needed - getting through the day is more than enough.

As in his memoir Self, the main character's thoughts and memories, offset in italics, fly across the page like a pinball - handy, given Elaine is a seething mass of neuroses about to go critical at virtually any point.

I don't think Self is given enough credit for writing convincingly about women, especially when seen from within. Not many male authors do, with the exception of the late Brian Moore. Self is another.

I admit I prefer the relative discipline of this work to the other novels, which suffer from too much self-indulgence and too little concern for the reader. His short stories, interestingly, rarely suffer from the same problem, where WS can play out a conceit to its logical conclusion and then quit while he's still ahead.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Self near his remarkable best - not quite up to the standards of the Umbrella/Shark/Phone trilogy, but it shares a lot of the formal techniques of that masterpiece - the fractured sentences and timeshifts and mental leaps, the suppressed (sometimes impermissible) thoughts bubbling up through the surface text in italics - but in place of the trilogy's voluminous, all-consuming capaciousness, Elaine gives us an intense, claustrophobic focus on an individual character's inner life. It is bewildering at first and you do have to steel yourself to the challenge of fighting your way through the confusing thickets of the protagonist's mind, but the reward is well worth the effort. Self is one of the few contemporary writers taking on the Modernist project of depicting the human consciousness as it actually manifests inside our own heads.

[Melissa Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elaine is a 1950s housewife who is contemplating her life and the choices she has made. Pushing back against what is deemed the norm, she damages her marriage by having an affair, and within her inner dialogue, we see the frustrations firsthand of a housewife of the 50s.

I’m not sure if this novel was for me. There was too much contemplation and not enough plot. I would have liked to see more structure to the story, but it read precisely what it was based on—diary entries.

Overall, I would recommend it to someone looking for an in-depth psychological auto-oedipal fiction. It's a tad dry at times, but interesting nonetheless.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. 

[Kathleen Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is at best cringe-y and at worst, well, an odd and uncomfortable appropriation of Self's mother's diaries. I'm certain some will find this brilliant and praise it for the insight into a woman's mind but remember- this is drawn from Elaine's diaries. It's written with stylistic quirks that didn't bother me (I like ellipses and dots). Self tries to be incisive and funny as well as sad and desperate but again, that's his mother. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. This wasn't for me.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a grueling read. The concept is interesting enough—the author uses his mother's actual diary entries to craft a narrative about her life as a 1950's housewife. Presumably, real quotes and events are used and she's given the space to tell her own story rather than have it told for her. The execution of this, however, is rather lackluster. The writing is meant to be well-crafted (or so I'm told) but it's the kind of pretentious that narrows the book's audience to a pinpoint. Also, I realize this is supposed to be based on real-life experiences, but it felt like such a tired trope (1950's bored housewife in a toxic relationship who has affairs with even less deserving men). I wouldn't really recommend this book to a wide audience.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not that this book is somehow truly incredible; it's that the source material makes it incredible.

Self had his mother's meticulous journals which he used to construct his heroine in her own words. There are so many little thoughts and details that I'd normally be annoyed that a man had inserted, but Self's mother wrote them for herself about herself. She is allowed to be her own narrator, and his work feels true to that ethos.

[Charlie · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 50% and I only read that long because I was hoping it would get better.

The prose is so overwhelming and unnavigable that it is (as another reader reviewed it) unreadable. The pov bounces between third and first person in such an unformated way as to wonder who the narrator even is. Altogether one of the worst books I've attempted to read.

[Sarah]

We're all time travellers, Elaine thinks, setting off from the recent past, on a voyage of discovery to the near future: whose ghostly hands will glove mine this time, as once again I tear out page after page, then stuff them into the fire - as I destroy writing rather than create it?

[Mary · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book almost unreadable. I persisted till about 3/4 through I gave up. The characters were pathetic yet uninteresting, the writing was mediocre. I haven't read this author before, and I am not encouraged to read him again.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Andrew Wesley]

Not a fave, prefer his odder stuff…

[Catho · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. Tedious

[Catrina Harmon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written. Boring plot.

[Valdine Ciwko · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having recently read Forbidden Notebook by Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes written about a woman in the same time period, which was very powerful, I found this an unsatisfying read.

[Thomas Lingham · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish.

I've enjoyed many of Self's books in the past, but not this one.

[Yvonne · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 1% and skimming ugh!

[Zak · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to give up by page 192. It is a fascinating subject matter, no doubt. Sadly, the book is monotonous, boring, and painfully the worst thing Will Self has ever written.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. Great writing. Elaine is immediately recognizable as one of the many women I've known tortured by the mundanity of heteronormativity and class. Edited to have a higher rating because Elaine (the character) pops into my head weeks later.
ARC