Standing in the road outside her suburban home in Ithaca, New York, Elaine asks herself, is this it? How has her life come to this? Elaine is the central character in Will Self’s latest novel and it is tempting to ask how much she is based on the intimate diaries kept for more than 40 years by Self’s Jewish-American mother, Elaine Rosenbloom.
The novel follows Elaine’s life for almost two years, from 1954 to 1955, a few years before Self was born in 1961. One of the novel’s greatest strengths is the way it captures the feel of a small academic town in upstate New York in the mid-Fifties. It is full of knowing references to race relations, Kinsey’s pioneering work on sexuality, Miltown (a popular tranquilizer at the time) and psychoanalysis, then enjoying its heyday. Elaine notices “the language of psychoanalysis creeping into ordinary speech and commonplace prose… everyone’s doing it”.
The novel is full of cocktail parties where everyone drinks and smokes enormously and men and women alike pursue adulterous affairs. Parenting seems half-hearted, to put it mildly. There are fascinating cameo appearances by Saul Bellow and especially the Nabokovs (he published his most famous work, Lolita, the year after his appearance in the novel) and telling references to the antisemitism of the time.
The novel, though, is Jewish lite. There are plenty of Jewish names. Elaine’s analyst is called Dr Freudenberg, there are characters called Rosenthal, the Goldbergs, she sees a doctor called Dr Rosenbloom (presumably named after Self’s mother), and the man Elaine is chasing after is called Ted Trippmann. There’s a small scattering of Yiddish words, mishigas, kishkes, and Elaine’s friend Lily Rosenthal cooks “fried latkes, sliced lox, molded [sic] meatloaves… and made her own kreplach”. But it’s hard to see the novel as a reckoning with Self’s own Jewish identity. He famously “resigned” as a Jew in 2006, then in 2018 he rethought his position in response to antisemitism in Britain. The real question, though, is he a Jewish writer and, judging from Elaine, the answer is surely no. We are a long way from the rhythms of Bellow, Roth and Nicole Krauss.
A central theme is the sexism of the time. 1950s Cornell is a man’s world. “Men have so many places to go, people to see, interesting things to do! It makes things easier for them. I sit,” – Elaine thinks –“and I brood.”
She is married to a middlebrow Milton scholar, John Hancock, who is much more interested in promotion or a Fulbright fellowship rather than his wife or their only child, Billy. In fact, he’s more interested in other women than in his wife and their terrible marriage, always teetering on collapse, finally reaches crisis-point when John explodes “into a rage the like of which she’s seen only a couple of times in the 13 years of their marriage. You bitch! He mewls – and then … You slut! … I disgust you? That’s rich, when you disgust me far more…’ This is hardly Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And this is the biggest problem: the writing is not in the same league as Albee, Bellow or Nabokov. Nor is the storytelling. How often have we read novels about adulterous, hard-drinking academics and their failing marriages?
But Elaine is at the heart of the novel and many readers will sympathise as she struggles with terrible mental health issues. She’s a classic heroine from the Fifties, a frustrated writer, stuck in the suburbs and in a loveless marriage. She is full of self-loathing, “a hysterical screamer, chucker, and sobber”. Self’s sympathies are clearly with Elaine, modelled on his own mother. The question is are the reader’s? And are sympathies a good enough substitute for great writing?
Elaine, by Will Self
Grove Press, £18.99
