“Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert said. What would Will Self say of his new novel? “Elaine, c’est moi”? “Madame Bovary, c’est ma mere”? Described in the blurb as “perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction”, Elaine is based, we’re told, on the diaries of Self’s mother, Elaine, so it promises just the sort of ping-pong game of identification and countertransference a writer so steeped in psychoanalysis is likely to revel in. It also puts a writer whose usual beat has been the grimy pubs and crumbling mental hospitals of London into the territory of Richard Yates or John Cheever.
It’s the mid-1950s, upstate New York. Elaine is a thwarted writer, unhappily married to John Hancock, an ambitious Milton scholar jockeying for tenure at Cornell. Elaine once studied poetry under Theodore Roethke, but now she’s a home-maker, a faculty wife, trapped by potlucks and pot roasts and the pressing of shirts (she calls the ironing the irony). She suffers migraines, severe PMS and hysterical attacks. She drinks too much. She has been quietly sacked by her therapist, Dr Freudenberg (really), and she chews over that rejection while angrily rejecting his psychoanalytic nostrums. She has imagined killing their toddler, Billy, before killing herself. And she lusts, semi-hopelessly, humiliatingly, after other men: specifically, when we meet her, John’s swarthy and assured colleague Ted Troppmann.
