Elaine
An extraordinary portrait of the female soul under the conditions of 20th-century misogyny ... Consistently luxurious ... Elaine is the very model of an unlikable narrator; she’s degraded and her company often feels degrading. But she’s also witty and exhilaratingly blunt, and her darkest opinions are often right on the money.
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To inhabit the libidinal consciousness of one’s own mother is an inherently awkward undertaking ... It is a compassionate if somewhat flip portrait, and by the time we reach its sad denouement the reader has only sympathy—and not just for poor Elaine. Lurking in the text as young Billy, who gazes out at us like some reproachful Freudian ghost, Will Self has written his own origin story.
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The book’s greatest offences...are not sexual but stylistic. Self’s maximalism has not aged well ... Self’s fiction occasionally arrives at characterisation by way of accretion, but Elaine’s interiority never quite coalesces.
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