Will Self

I'd wanted to read the work of Will Self for a while, and recently finished his debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. I should say at the start that this is not a perfect book, and it's not for everyone. Self seems to have set a goal for himself of charting in this collection the strange, the unusual, the unstable. Each of the stories uncovers a certain irrationality -- even, yes, a form of insanity -- but that in itself appears to be in the service of a smaller granule of truth. When Self writes of a psychiatric ward, for instance, he has as much to say about the nature of the psychotic as he does about our crazed attempts to manifest pathologies. Self does this elsewhere, too: his chapter about a philosophy of "waiting" unlocks as much about time as it does about an uncommon addiction to motion. I enjoyed these stories, but I didn't love them: I wasn't always sure about Self's style; it felt rickety, and sometimes predictable. The quirkiness of the stories, like their characters, also felt contrived: evocative, but contrived. There's an urban quality to The Quantity Theory, and an appreciation for London as a caldron of human experience. And for this, Self is to be celebrated. But in the end, I thought that there were other ways, perhaps, to explore the unorthodox, and locating a faint truth under cascades of irrationality seemed formulaic. For a more effective rendering of the insane, or the absurd, see When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut's tremendous rendering of science and psychology amidst the tumult of the twentieth century.