What an interesting book. I liked the idea of the story and it kept me engaged from the start. A few points were a bit long and drawn out but overall the writing and character development were spot on. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

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 and loss. 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.