By Vanessa Francesca
FICTION
Elaine
Will Self
Allen and Unwin, $32.99
Will Self describes his new novel, drawn from 40 years of his mother’s diaries, as “auto-oedipal fiction”. It’s a term borrowed from the current literary craze of autofiction, or first-person, politically engaged writing that blends sociology and memoir. So what happens when the child tries to speak with the dead parent’s voice?
Self based Elaine on diaries he and his brother found when their mother was dying from cancer in 1988. The novel recreates the period from 1947 to 1957, before his birth in 1961.
His reimagined Elaine rolls her eyes at her scholar husband and longs to make love to his colleagues, the diaries a record of the thoughts she must keep hidden.
Self, the most distinctive novelist of his generation, offers an empathetic projection across time, about a woman who can hide neither her displeasure from her children nor her contempt for her husband. She evokes earlier feminist heroes such as Betty Draper from Mad Men and April Wheeler of Revolutionary Road.
Will Self describes his latest novel as “auto-oedipal fiction”.
At one point, “Elaine smells the reheated meatloaf they must’ve had for their supper – a dish she prepared and refrigerated before she left – and again she’s overwhelmed by a desire to be alone and lick my greasy wounds … On Saturday evening – if they do, after all, attend the Lemesuriers’ annual cocktail party – John will do it again: pick-picking away at some mispronunciation or grammatical error of his wife’s ...”
The italicised stream of consciousness is an innovation that saw Self shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novel Umbrella in 2012. In 2019, he again used this prose style in the picaresque memoir Will , depicting himself as a drug-addicted intellectual trying to win over a cruel world. In Elaine, Self offers two unreliable narrators who are too articulate and too smart for their own good. One of them is Elaine. The other is his father, John Self, who cannot stop correcting his wife, even though it makes neither of them look smart.
The pathos is all the greater because these are smart people who care about keeping up with the times. Whether she’s joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or dismissing psychoanalysis as a fad, Self’s Elaine is delightfully retro and deliciously pithy, with a rich interior monologue that gives us insight into other people.
Elaine reminds us that at heart, the novel is a gift of otherness conveyed through language. This bold and deft conceit is first and foremost a love letter. It is also Self at his beneficent best, alive to the gifts that language can bring.
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