Will Self’s impressive paean to his mother’s frustrating life in the US
Will Self’s recent, exceptional fictional trilogy, comprising Umbrella, Shark and Phone, displays a deep preoccupation with the ways that time, memory, family, psychosis and history interact. The novels are complex, multigenerational narratives, composed in a late modernist style as engaging as it is experimental. Formal playfulness, with the prose switching between its characters’ consciousnesses, sometimes even midsentence, is married to solidly satisfying plots. Having already excavated his own life in a memoir, Will, Self has now turned to his mother in a novel, Elaine. Self has written about Elaine Rosenbloom before (in the short story “North London Book of the Dead”); she also appears as the narrator, Lily Bloom, in How the Dead Live.
