The Will Self Appreciation Thread
 

He uses words like 'ebullient' when it'd be easier to write 'happy' and he looks like a hip funeral director. He's a know brainer for a classic TV interview, and I have it on good authority that a lot of female thirty somethings find him a bit snoggable.

Give it up for the man like Will: Novelist/social critic/all around media bad bwoi:




Typically brilliant at a book shop discussion:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MuSm3147rzg

my wife fancies him in a wierd way so yeah, your authority is good.. very funny man.

He looks like John Cale in that picture.

That's very true. I never noticed but you're right, he does. An ex of mine was totally in love with John Cale and fancies the pants off Will Self. So maybe that's what it is. I want a John Cale make-over, and QUICK!

As a novelist I find him risible in his interminable pantheon of pithy, verbose insouicance; narrative content is substituted for showy word-wankery. As a more acerbic Stephen Fry-style TV pundit he's great.

Seriously a shit writer though.

haha him
i watched him yesterday when karl pilkington was havin a chat with him
great stuff
he seems like a wimpy

Agree with Glice about his novels (although his criticism can be OK). Suffers with the same style problems as Martin Amis (who I also prefer as a critic). However he does possess a certain perversity about him that remains ultimately endearing.( Something that Amis, in his bid to be an American intellectual in everything but actual nationality, never has). In many ways Christopher Hitchens is the aggregate of both.

I agree too, his novels have always struck me as too similar (in terms of the style of writing) to Amis' worst novels: sometimes it's literally impossible to understand what is going on, without re-reading, as everything is layered in periphrasis and nothing is said directly. Also, like Amis, he annoys me when he tries to be casually shocking (i.e., 'cunt' said all the time, misogyny).

I wish he'd just write the way that he speaks because he's very entertaining, as that clip proves.

The thing I just discovered about Amis is how he totally rips off Saul Bellow (I recently finished Herzog.). Entire lines seem lifted from him in a way that is borderline out of order. Bellow is a FAR better writer than Amis so anyone put off by the comparison who hasn't read him (Bellow that is) shouldn't be. Herzog is a genuinely great novel. The nearest I think Amis has ever come to greatness is probably Money, and I'm not even convinced by THAT!

I struggle to think of a really great living british novelist at the moment. Ian McEwan maybe, but he seems less and less interesting with every book he publishes. Ballard I still think is a master but I imagine he's not to everyone's taste. Certainly Britain hasn't produced a figure to match the likes of Bellow, Wolfe or DeLillo. Amis has tried but, as has been discussed, his insights tend to become compromised by his awful style. Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth' was OK but seemed more a reflection of its time than a reflection on them. I haven't read 'On Beauty', but I suppose I should, having heard it's quite good - albeit by the same people that celebrated 'White Teeth'.

We're clearly far better at producing entertaining media pundits right now, than we are great novelists.

Of course, the irony of this statement is that it does have a touch of the Self about it, er, itself.;)

what about Ishiguro? The Remains Of The Day and The Unconsoled have convinced me that he's a great British novelist.

I've made a note of getting a copy of Herzog now, sounds like my kind of thing from the synopsis.

I think Success is Amis' best, followed by London Fields. They have the problems of all of his novels but the highest memorable-descriptive-phrases-to-nonsense ratio.

Very conscious daahrlink.

I think my point is something to the affect of: there are a handful of writers who have a mastery of English who frighten me; Self is one. Self also entirely fails to say anything that makes me think he's anything other than a wastrell. He has a vocabulary in the region of Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Joyce, Eliot, Hardy but he has the writing style somewhere around Catherine Cookson (but, astonishingly, a far shitter writer).

I dunno, I've got a soft spot for his re-write of Dorian Gray, but nothing else I've read did anything for me. He's always fun as a talking head though.

Yes, I guessed as much about your self-conscious Self-isms. I think the problem with WS's style, as opposed to someone like Derrida, is that it has no broader function. As we know, the French postmodernist writers were using language as a commentary on language itself while Will Self seems only interested in dazzling the reader with his expanded vocabulary.

Regarding NWRA's mention of Ishiguro as a great british novelist - I tend to put him in with McEwan: as a great writer technically, but one that fails to really address big issues in his work in a way that American writers like Bellow, DeLillo, Updike and Wolfe do. The Remains of the Day is a beautiful novel, but ultimately has very little to say about anything. Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, on the other hand, while not as technically polished, has a grand scale to it that the British really haven't managed to produce, probably since Dickens. It's as though the British literary 'establishment' find such subjects vulgar. Ballard's latest novel Kingdom Come is a great attempt at trying to nail the national zeitgeist, and it's interesting how he remains for many within that establishment something of an outsider, pushed into the ghetto of the science fiction genre.

I'll brush over the use of the 'p' word for now.

I think with a lot of writers of the less 'trendy' sort they have a comparable vocabulary to Self but a much greater ability to deploy it. Your menopausal Guardian friendlies (Maeve Binchy, Maggie Atwood or whomever) tend to use their extensive wordsmithery with a touch of grace, élan. If you someone is better known for their words than their content then they're not really a great writer, are they?

i like will self. some of his books are not that great but as a person he seems ok.

I always feel slightly soiled when using the 'p' word. But you know, sometimes it just comes out. like a sicky burp.

And no, good wordmithery does not necessarily a good writer make - as my continually aborted attempts at reading most current British novelists proves. At least to me!

I went through a phase of being totally into him but have come to regard him as a pure stylist when it comes to novels (still a very good one at that, mind). I prefer his short story collection although I did enjoy Great Apes very much.

I read his short stories (A Short History of the English Novel I especially liked), and Great Apes (but it didn't click), too.
But my favourite is Cock & Bull, which is shorter than his novels, and could be described as two short stories put together, one being deiberately funny, the other lurking on terror - both very efficiently.

he's got an impressive vocabulary, but i can't really think of anything to like about him