Elaine by Will Self review – all about my mother

An extraordinary portrait of a frustrated and furious 1950s American housewife, based on the diaries of Self’s 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.

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