Elaine by Will Self review – all about my mother

Will Self has a history of gonzo premises. He has written novels set in the afterlife, in a world ruled by chimpanzees, in a post-apocalyptic society based on the misogynist rantings of a London cabby. When his characters aren’t engaged in necrophilia, they’re fighting off swarms of hungry sharks. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that his new novel, Elaine, is a relentlessly quotidian psychological study of a 1950s housewife, in which the main character is mostly alone, cooking, cleaning and yearning for one of her husband’s colleagues. It makes more sense, however, when you learn that the housewife in question is inspired by Self’s mother, and the book is based on diaries found after her death.
The novel covers a period in the mid-50s, some years before Self was born. Elaine is a Jewish-American housewife, married to an Ivy League academic, living a densely frustrated life the reader intimately, even claustrophobically shares. The narration is close third person, infused with Elaine’s scabrous, wailing, unsparingly filthy, energetically misanthropic, casually brilliant voice. Of course it’s not exactly hers; Self’s mother was born a Rosenbloom, her fictional avatar is a Rosenthal, and this may hint at how much of a change we should imagine her to have undergone during her passage into fiction. In snippets, too, the book strays into an italicised first person, which I took to be quotes from the actual diary. Whether or not this is right, it was one of several moves that kept me aware of the permeable barrier here between reality and fiction. When Elaine bellyaches about losing her temper and slapping her child (presumably based on Self’s half-brother, though suggestively named Billy), we can’t help thinking about the author’s own childhood. Throughout, Self as author/son has the insubstantial, jarring presence of a child who has not yet been born. There is nothing he doesn’t know about Elaine, and we end up sunk far deeper in her than we are usually sunk in anyone but ourselves. She is our world as a mother is the world of a child.
The action – insofar as there is action – takes place in Ithaca, New York, where Elaine is a stay-at-home mother married to a Milton scholar for whom she feels nothing but revulsion. His “meagre, hairless chest” and his “sex-hungry little simper” infuriate her. She finds his scholarship as risible as his body. The fact that he nursed her patiently through her breakdowns only makes her despise him more. But Elaine feels rancour toward just about everyone: her backbiting friends, her fatuous psychiatrist, her cat, even her inamorata, a hearty, ordinary man who enraptures her even as she sees him for the philistine boor he is. Her hatred for herself, though, is what goes deepest. Elaine sees her writings as “reams of girlish gush” and burns them in an ecstasy of self-annihilation. She herself is “an ugly and benighted beast that walks and walks and walks, then every decade or so squats down to give birth to another little cub”. Haunted by the persistent idea of murdering her son, she reflects, “Thinking such vile things … is what gives me this mean expression: the two deep grooves running from my forehead to either side of my hateful nose”. It’s an extraordinary portrait of the female soul under the conditions of 20th-century misogyny.
This is also a work of historical fiction. There’s the academic world of the time, with its petty rivalries, universal alcoholism and incestuous parties, at which a fad develops for “necking” in the kitchen with other people’s spouses. There’s Elaine’s criminally stupid Freudian psychoanalyst, given to explanations that frame little girls as seductresses and unhappy women as penis enviers. There’s the misogyny, which has seeped into even the tiniest cracks of Elaine’s psyche, and the implacable enmity between men and women it engenders. Self uses the language of the American 50s intelligentsia like a native: infra dig, picayune, yakety-yak, lothario, with the liberal sprinkling of French as an arch flourish: the cat is not pregnant but enceinte; the exhaustion of a topic is signaled with Ça suffit! This is the McCarthy era, and Elaine’s husband is a closet Marxist who talks to sympathetic friends with a “whispery seriousness” that annoys the apolitical Elaine. To her, men care about politics “only because it confirms them in their own superiority … That, and because it gives them something to sit beside – the way they’ll sit beside a river or on Ted’s boat, waiting for a bite or a revelation.”
This is one of countless wonderful aperçus that make the texture of the novel consistently luxurious. Take this extravagant description of flushing a toilet: “To thrust down the lever is to trigger local – but total – devastation, albeit destruction from which … civilisation soon arises anew”. Or this passage, where Elaine and her husband leave a drunken soiree: “The whole evolved world of the Lemesuriers’ party is immediately pushed deep into the past – or at least, that’s how it seems to Elaine as they clamber into the damp jail of the Buick”.
Elaine is the very model of an unlikable narrator; she’s degraded and her company often feels degrading. But she’s also witty and exhilaratingly blunt, and her darkest opinions are often right on the money. We ultimately come to admire her, as we might an incorrigible friend. In exposing all the dirtiest laundry of his mother’s psyche, Self has perversely elevated and honoured her. Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity.