BIll Self has a history full 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 misogynistic rants of a London taxi driver. When his characters aren’t being necrophiliacs, they’re battling schools of hungry sharks. So it may be surprising to learn that his new novel, Elaine is a brutally mundane psychological study of a 1950s housewife in which the main character is mostly alone, cooking, cleaning, and pining for a colleague of her husband’s. 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 is set in the mid-1950s, a few years before Self’s birth. Elaine is a Jewish-American housewife married to an Ivy League academic, and leads a life of frustration in which the reader participates intimately, even claustrophobically. The narration is in the third person, permeated by Elaine’s shabby, whining, relentlessly dirty, energetically misanthropic, casually brilliant voice. Of course, it is not exactly her; Self’s mother was born a Rosenbloom, her fictional avatar is a Rosenthal, and that might indicate how much we can imagine she changed during her transition into fiction. In excerpts, the book also strays into an italicized first person, which I took to be quotes from the actual diary. Whether that’s accurate or not, it was one of several moves that made me realize that permeable barrier between reality and fiction. When Elaine whines about losing her temper and hitting her child (presumably based on Self’s half-brother, although the name Billy is suggestive), we can’t help but think of the author’s childhood. Throughout the film, Self as author/son has the disembodied, disturbing presence of a child not yet born. There is nothing he doesn’t know about Elaine, and we end up sinking into her much more deeply than we normally sink into anyone except ourselves. She is our world, as a mother is a child’s world.
The action – if there is any action – takes place in Ithaca, New York, where Elaine is a housewife and mother married to a Milton scholar for whom she feels nothing but loathing. His “scrawny, hairless chest” and “sex-starved little demeanor” infuriate her. She finds his scholarship as ridiculous as his body. The fact that he has patiently nursed her through her breakdowns only makes her despise him more. But Elaine feels resentment toward just about everyone: her slanderous friends, her silly psychiatrist, her cat, even her lover, a warm, ordinary man who enraptures her even though she sees him for the stuffy lout that he is. Her hatred of herself, however, is what runs deepest. Elaine sees her writings as “reams of girlish gush” and burns them in an ecstasy of self-annihilation. She herself is “an ugly and ignorant beast who walks and walks and walks and then every ten years or so crouches down to give birth to another little cub.” Haunted by the persistent thought of murdering her son, she muses: “The thought of such hideous things… is what gives me that vile expression: the two deep furrows that run from my forehead to either side of my hated nose.” It is an extraordinary portrait of the female soul under conditions of 20th century misogyny.
This is also a work of historical fiction. There is the academic world of the time, with its petty rivalries, general alcoholism, and incestuous parties where it becomes a trend to “make out” in the kitchen with other people’s spouses. There is Elaine’s criminally stupid Freudian psychoanalyst, who gives explanations that paint little girls as seductresses and unhappy women as penis-envious. There is the misogyny that has seeped into even the smallest cracks of Elaine’s psyche, and the irreconcilable enmity between men and women that it engenders. Self uses the language of the ’50s American intelligentsia like a native: infradig, picayun, Yakety YakWomanizer, with a generous pinch of French as a harsh decoration: the cat is not pregnant, but gentian; The exhaustion of a topic is signaled by That’s enough! It’s the McCarthy era, and Elaine’s husband is a closet Marxist who talks to sympathetic friends with a “whispering earnestness” that annoys the apolitical Elaine. For her, men are only interested in politics “because it confirms their own superiority… And because it gives them something to sit next to – like sitting on the river bank or on Ted’s boat waiting for a bite. or a revelation.”
This is one of the countless wonderful aperçus that the The novel’s structure is luxurious throughout. Take, for example, this extravagant description of the toilet flush: “Pushing the lever down unleashes local—but total—devastation, albeit a destruction that… Civilization will soon be reborn”. Or this passage in which Elaine and her husband leave a soiree with alcohol consumption: “The whole developed world of the Lemesuriers party is immediately pushed back into the past – or at least that is how it seems to Elaine when she enters the damp prison of the Buick”.
Elaine is the textbook example of an unsympathetic narrator; she is degraded and her company often feels demeaning. But she is also witty and thrillingly direct, and her darkest views are often spot on. Ultimately, we admire her, as we would an incorrigible friend. By exposing the dirtiest laundry of his mother’s psyche, Self has perversely elevated and honored her. Elaine is not only a serious work of art, but also an unexpected act of childlike generosity.
