A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.
Entry from Elaine’s diary, February, 1956
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. 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. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. ALSO: I usually put my quoteblocks in italics, but here I present them as found because Self’s use of italics is too integral to the novel for me to mess with.)
Her hysteria is mounting — and as Evelyn Tate’s screen door snaps shut, Elaine says it a third time: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able . . . to do my job as a housekeeper? Each phrase is separated by a troubled gasp — but it doesn’t matter how fast she babbles or deeply she breathes, the panic has the better of her: I’m going to collapse, she thinks, then be swept up into the sky with my goddamn nightie up around my shoulders . . . The last anyone will ever see of me is the first anyone did: my bare behind, waiting to be smacked.
Suffering from migraines and panic attacks and unresolved childhood trauma, Elaine Hancock routinely relies on her husband, John, to help care for both her and their nine-year-old son, Billy; but as even Elaine’s former therapist noted that John and Billy’s relationship was “unusually close”, Elaine is often made to feel both chained to and surplus to their family arrangement. Dreaming of being an author, Elaine fills her time alone by writing stories in her secret notebooks; but as she can tell that her writing is “worthless and banal”, Elaine burns her fiction, only hanging on to her diaries, filled with secrets and schedules and sexual fantasies. And these are sexed-up times: Between feeling disgust at her husband’s clumsy overtures and like a second-tier prize at Cornell faculty parties (where folks swap spouses for slow dances and drunken necking), Elaine is ripe to fall hard for the manly new Sociology professor when he and his glamorous wife both join the faculty; a crush that will not end well. Spanning the period of about a year, with Elaine thinking back on earlier episodes from her life, this novel explores all of the ways that society, and Elaine’s own mental fragility, conspired against her fulfilment and happiness.
That’s the plot, but as for the format, the most striking feature is Self’s use of italics:
Dressed in slacks and a sweater she descends . . . she descends, dressed in slacks and a sweater — in sweater and slacks dressed, she descends: each thought corresponds to a word or words, right? Mix ’em up and you get a wordy sorta salad, like the mess in my head . . .
In a recent(ish) interview with The Sydney Herald, Self explains that although he is a Professor of Modern Thought at Brunel University in west London, he has stopped teaching literature because, “I cannot find students that are capable of understanding what literary influence is. They simply haven’t read enough and don’t have the [required] fine grain of understanding.” So at the risk of demonstrating my own failings, I’ll share that whenever I saw these paragraphs that contain italics, I assumed they were references to other sources. I recognised some references to Steinbeck and Shakespeare, The Odyssey is gestured to beyond the setting of Ithaca, Paradise Lost beyond it being the focus of Elaine’s husband’s academic career; I felt clever when I recognised Venus in Furs. But I didn’t recognise most of the italicised bits, and while some phrases like “bitter as the cud” prove to be from poems a better read person might know (Wilson Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est), phrases like “red and scummy patches in a stainless steel kidney dish” and “a chill cold blast of sunlight” don’t have any google results. Are they simply all phrases from Elaine’s diaries, the “wordy sorta salad” that made a “mess” in her head? Whether they were the results of her own reading and study or original phrasing, that’s what I decided to go with, and it did serve to make Elaine an even more intriguing character. Having studied under the poet Ted Roethke, discussed writing with Nabokov and Bellow at faculty events, and serving an invaluable role as transcriptionist and editor for her husband’s academic writing throughout her marriage, Elaine is understandably frustrated to be entirely judged (even by herself) by her competence as a housekeeper.
Yes, she’d been unhappy — upset, often, as well. But in those far-off days of a fortnight ago, with her complaisant old man, her girlish crush on his colleague, and her catty best friend, Elaine had been a goddamn poster girl for the Modern American Woman: posed in her kitchen, skirts stiff as crinolines, smile plasticized, a penis in one hand . . . a spatula in the other.
This is the kind of novel one can imagine being taught — all those literary references tracked down by students more relentless than I in pursuit of their sources — and the type of novel that’s submitted for awards. But unlike some novels that bore or soar right over my head for the sake of being different, Self has crafted Elaine to be unique in form while totally relatable in substance. I felt I got to know his character “Elaine” (whether or not she is very faithful to the known facts of his actual mother) and hers is a story that I am glad to have been told.
