Jun 22, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Will Self
Grove
ISBN 978-0802119728
432 pages
$24
Reviewed by Adam Langer, who is working on a sequel to his most recent novel, "The Thieves of Manhattan"
Halfway through "Walking to Hollywood," Will Self's trippy triptych of quasi-autobiographical narratives detailing his obsessions and neuroses, is a novel-length story, also called "Walking to Hollywood," in which the author travels to L.A. to see what happened to the movies.
"I want to find out who killed film," Self writes. "For film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age. I don't know if film was murdered -- but I suspect there's a killer out there."
Perhaps the more pressing question at the heart of this book turns out to be not whether anyone murdered the movies, but whether the movies and Western pop culture are murdering literature. For, while reading Self, we find ourselves in the company of an uncommonly gifted wordsmith. The man can write with the savage wit of Martin Amis, the erudition of Christopher Hitchens, the incisive self-analysis of Spalding Gray, and with an enviable vocabulary that, at its best, can make you think of James Joyce. Self is an expert in spoofing both high and low culture; he drops knowing, funny references to Mike Myers' "The Love Guru," comic songwriting duo Flanders and Swann and Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson. He's also an inspired coiner of neologisms and a splendid creator of metaphors. A jet trundles along a runway "with all the grace of a stolen shopping trolley"; two hands "Sistine" together; a dead ringer for French author Michel Houellebecq is a "Houellebecqalike"; souped-up elevator music is "Rachmaninschmaltz."
And yet the author utilizes all this talent and skill in the service of conceits so flimsy that they can be overwhelmed by his Self-consciousness and his Tourette's-like tic for inserting pop-culture references everywhere. These are so numerous and often so distracting that they can make the reader forget that Self is telling any particular story at all.
"What did narrative have going for it anyway?" Self asks himself at one point. Well, judging from what's missing from large portions of this book, quite a lot actually.
"Walking to Hollywood" starts out promisingly enough with "Very Little," a novella that concerns the author's long-standing friendship and rivalry with Sherman Oaks, a 39-inch-tall artist who has achieved international stardom with his work, in which he recreates his own body on an increasingly gigantic scale, even attempting to make a 26-mile-long outline of himself in the Great Salt Lake Desert. Much of this material is entertaining and engaging because Sherman Oaks is a memorably idiosyncratic character. Although the story may be diminutive, it is also compact enough to effectively accommodate the narrator's ruminations about, say, his own obsessive-compulsive disorder and his occasional, amusing digressions, which include the lurid, Self-abusive fantasies he harbors regarding the "dreadful things" he might do with the LongPen, an invention that Margaret Atwood helped to create for signing autographs at a great distance.
But then comes the novel within the novel, "Walking to Hollywood," a metaphysical detective story that is so completely dwarfed by the author's asides that even its cleverest observations can become maddening. As Self ambles through Hollywood in search of cinema's killer, he loses his grip on reality. Everyone he sees is not only someone in and of himself but also his cinematic representation. So Will Self appears not only as Will Self, but also as Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis, actors who somewhat resemble him and might have conceivably played him in a movie. Self dines with the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, whom he imagines being played by a 40-something Orson Welles, apparently because both men never quite equaled their first successes and became exceedingly self-referential and also rather puffy in their middle years. The computer HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" makes an appearance. So do the "quadrumanous cartoon dog" Scooby-Doo and Griffin Mill from "The Player." As for what Self imagines Judy Garland doing with the Tin Woodman, let's skip it. A little of this goes a very long way, and there are more than 200pages of it. To borrow from a Monty Python routine about Australian table wines, "eight bottles of this and you're really finished."
The effect of all these winking references can be so wearying that one suspects that Self must be trying to annoy us on purpose, to make us experience how our own obsessions with banal minutiae destroy our ability to read or tell an engaging story. I found myself reminded of the director Jean-Luc Godard, who in the film "Week End" forced his viewers to experience the frustration of being stuck in a traffic jam by depicting one on screen for nearly 10 minutes. Perhaps Self is intentionally bludgeoning us with pop-culture riffs to desensitize us to them so that we might eventually kill them off. Perhaps he's urging us to kill the movies and rid ourselves of our largely useless references to, say, Monty Python routines or Godard films, after which we can once again focus on stories that are more personal, truthful, poetic and universal.
That interpretation would go a long way toward explaining why some passages in "Spurn Head," Self's elegiac meditation on the loss of personal and cultural memory that completes his triptych, seem so refreshing and sublime. As Self's narrator experiences the eroding effects of early onset Alzheimer's while traveling along the coastline of East Yorkshire, the knowing references do not entirely disappear, but they seem to fade away. What emerges in their place is the Self that exists apart from all the distractions that bedevil his thoughts and his prose: a phenomenally talented artist, one capable of work far greater than what he describes in his "Afterword" as this "contorted, wayward and melancholic" book.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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