The Sweet Smell of Pyschosis: A Novella (Will Self) - Softcover

Self, Will

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802136478 ISBN 13: 9780802136473

Publisher: Avalon Travel Publishing, 1999

Synopsis

I received William Burroughs's seminal (in more sense than one!) novel Naked Lunch as a form prize when I was fifteen. I read it with a distinct sense of horripilation, as if the vile secretions it described might ooze through the pages and the orgiastic rituals it depicted were subject to incorporation into my own, fevered imagination.Burroughs's influence on me as a writer has been impossibly confused with the impact of his writing. From his life I took the dubious message that in order to nurture a standpoint of fearless detachment -- from country, from class, from all allegiances -- it was permissible to indulge in the most irrational derangement of the senses. Yet while this was the pose, its enactment was one of steely-eyed perspicacity. If there was the Burroughs of Nova Express, Dead Fingers Talk, and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, willfully employing his unconscious as a test bed for the most exuberantly unpleasant of visions and ideas, then there was also the harsh empiricism of Junky to act as a corrective.But the main lesson the gestalt of Burroughs's life and his work taught me was that there exists a sinister congruence between the control systems implicit in capitalist societies (with their obsessional manufacturing and their compulsiveconsuming) and the uncontrollable psyche of the drug addict. It was Burroughs's great contribution to twentieth-century literature to merge his own psychopathology with the collective malaise. Truly, to paraphrase his friend Jack Kerouac, he made us all look at what was on the end of our forks.

About this title

Review:

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (very loosely based on Alexander Mackendrick's searing 50s movie Sweet Smell of Success) is the kind of mordant fable that Will Self could toss off in his sleep. But although it doesn't stretch Self's considerable talents, it is still a wonderfully poisonous entertainment.

Richard Hermes is a tiny cog in the London media machine, a hack whose only distinction is a tenuous position at the edge of the most powerful clique in town. At its heart is the loathsome Bell, a sort of malevolent anti-Oprah whose media omnipresence has given him enormous power.

One of Bell's most sycophantic acolytes had established--through certain arcane statistical computations--that there must, logically, be at least two hundred thousand people in Britain who did nothing else but listen to Bell's voice, watch Bell's face, or read his words, for every waking hour of their lives.

Richard is drawn deeper into Bell's web in pursuit of the gorgeous Ursula Bentley, but he can't keep up with the clique's colossal appetite for controlled substances. He soon begins to slide into drug-addled madness, and Self once again demonstrates his uncanny ability to render altered states in perfectly crafted prose. In fact, much of the pleasure that The Sweet Smell of Psychosis has to offer comes not from the story of Richard's inevitable fall, but from Self's deft and playful way with words. Few writers in English are able to use such beautiful language to describe the most revolting things. Whether he's writing about an excruciating hangover or Bell's naked body ("each pap sporting a twistle of black, black hair"), Self's decadent language begs to be savoured, even read out loud. Martin Rowson, the Hogarth to Self's Swift, provides some remarkable illustrations to accompany the text. Rowson's work (most recently showcased in his comic-book version of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) is grim and shadowy, but filled with detail and twisted humour. Together, he and Self have created an elegant billet-aigre to London's dark underbelly, a cautionary tale that takes pleasure in its own unpleasantness. --Simon Leake

About the Author:

Will Self is the author of THE QUANTITY THEORY OF INSANITY, shortlisted for the 1992 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and winner of the 1993 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, GREY AREA, COCK & BULL, MY IDEA OF FUN, JUNK MAIL, THE SWEET SMELL OF PSYCHOSIS, GREAT APES, TOUGH, TOUGH TOYS FOR TOUGH, TOUGH BOYS, DORIAN, and HOW THE DEAD LIVE, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002. He lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Avalon Travel Publishing
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0802136478
• ISBN 13: 9780802136473
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 98