March 14 - 21, 1 9 9 6
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Punk-symphonic

Will Self packs many a sordid scene into measured phrasing

by Chris Wright

GREY AREA, by Will Self. Grove/Atlantic, 287 pages, $22. "He had no interests but interest," reads the epigraph -- an epitaph for a Dr. Zack Busner -- that opens Grey Area, Will Self's latest snarl of short fiction. It's not until the penultimate tale, "Inclusionreg.," that we learn the significance of the quotation. When we do reach this point, having braved 200 or so furious pages of insights, grotesqueries, and bon mots, our certainty that we've heard the words before lends the story a real-life feel incongruous with its bizarre plot. For those of us who don't enjoy Tupperware-like powers of retention, this kind of subtle but persistent context-laying between tales gives them a sense of history; only if we return to the beginning of the book do we realize we've been had. Now that's what I call a conceit.

Click to read an interview with Will Self.

But one would expect nothing less from Will Self. On the strength of three previous works, he has barged in on the party of Britain's literary elite like a schizophrenic Samuel Johnson, like Jonathan Swift on angel dust. With a withering intellect, a vocabulary so extensive as to render useless the Pocket OED, Self is uproariously funny -- and twisted. Often it is the very collision of his formal phrasing with his sordid material that gives Self's writing its spark. Because of his brilliance, though, Self has often come across as a bit too brassy, and even as we're mesmerized by his punk-symphonic prose and lawless imagination, there is always that slight annoyance, a pearl of resentment at the sheer cleverness of the man. Some see his work as a repository of mental refuse, the slag of sadistic fantasy. It's true, Self can be as macabre as he is funny and erudite; I, for one, can recommend against reading his 1993 novel, My Idea of Fun, over lunch.

In this collection of nine allegorical stories, the brat in Self seems to have matured. Without sacrificing any of his wild invention or traumatizing wit, Grey Area reveals a newfound ease to Self's lexical and imaginative convolutions. He has honed his satirical point, and at the same time broadened his range of targets. The opening story, "Between the Conceits," is a first-person account of a London dominated by a pantheon of petty deities: Dooley, the Bollam sisters, Lechmere, Colin Purves, the Recorder, Lady Bob, and our narrator. The story opens with the declamation, "There are only eight people in London and fortunately I am one of them," then immediately mitigates this with an exemplary middle-class fib: "There simply isn't a snobbish bone in my whole body." The eight operate on their minions with unthinking cruelty: "[Dooley] farts -- and 4,209 children are beaten and buggered. He coughs -- and 68,238 sufferers from emphysema get promoted to cancer." Although we eventually see that the omnipotent narrator is merely a delusional little twerp living with his sick mother, the trick is that he would laugh at our illusion of freedom: we are subject to mundane causes and petty motives, "jerked this way and that by a pervert in Bloomsbury, or a dullard in the Shell Center, or an old incontinent in Clapton."

This kind of tweaking is far more engaging than some of his previous hellfire -- at least that which has marked his work since the marvelous Quantity Theory of Insanity. Grey Area is at its most disturbing when its nightmares remain submerged beneath eerily measured tones. In the title story, an obsessively organized office worker finds every day repeating itself. Things are inert, pending -- the eye-flickering moments before the balloon bursts. Self, who has fought his way back from heroin addiction, often touches on the theme of self-control through ritual and habit. But he has also seen the corrosive dreariness of suburbia, and "Grey Area" seems to point to the insanity engendered by ritualized monotony.

Another extreme is explored in "Inclusionreg.," which draws on Self's own experiences with mind-expanding substances, as well as the shrinks who clamber to get a piece of the anti-depressant pie. Unlike the woman in "Grey Area," who found herself interested in nothing, the human lab rats who are fed Inclusionreg. find themselves interested in everything, with nastily surreal consequences. One senses, in these two stories at least, a debate on the page between Self's boredom and his dementia.

"Scale," a loop-the-loop tale of a morphine-addicted motorway buff with a lifelong fantasy involving life's minutiae, is mockingly self-referential. The protagonist, as he lets us know, has lost his sense of scale. Scale crops up in all its denotations: the scale inside a kettle; the scales on a lizard; bathroom scales upon which he commits adultery with the au pair. Full of running jokes, asides, nods and winks, this may be the funniest thing Self has written yet. Less amusing is "Chest," a harrowing social satire that portrays a world choking to death on its own filth while clinging to its class distinctions as if they were an heirloom.

Self does still show traces of his old Willful Self-absorption, but in this collection his obvious talents easily outweigh his faults. By the time we reach the finale, "The End of the Relationship," we are as run-ragged as the young woman who careens through one estrangement after another. And as she is rejected one last time -- "This is a fortuitous moment for us to end our relationship" -- we feel as though Self is smiling, telling us to get lost, get out of his book. We smile with him at the conceit.