How the Dead Live

Surrounded by her two daughters, Lily Bloom, an aging American in the final stages of cancer, spends her time in a bed in Central London's Royal Ear Hospital, drugged with painkillers, moving in and out of consciousness, and railing against the unfairness of the world around, the sins of those around her, and her coming death. 40,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo.

HScathingly satiric and prophetic, this unsettling novel by Great Apes author Self will inevitably inspire comparison with Martin Amis's era-defining London Fields. Running on a vatic rage that is almost Swiftian in the totality of its objectDthe damned human conditionDit sweeps across the charnel-fields of contemporary existence. The enraged center is held by narrator Lily Bloom, a Jewish-American transplant to London. Harsh, unforgivably anti-Semitic, extreme, Lily is a larger-than-life character. In fact, she is literally dead when the reader first meets her. She's biding her afterlife in Dulston, the dead "cystrict" of London. In the first part of the book, she harks back to her terminal illness, when her 30-year-old daughter, Charlotte, arranged for her care. Dutiful, responsible and all too English, Charlotte reminds Lily of her despised second husband, David Yaws, Charlotte's father. Natasha, her younger daughter, is a beautiful drug addict, "far too selfish," as Lily comments, "to think of doing anything for herself. She's entirely centered on what others might do for her." Lily's nine-year-old son, David, or "Rude Boy," a profanity-spouting child crushed by a car in 1957, is reunited with her in the afterlife, as is her petrified still-birth, the "lithopedion," and the fat she lost dieting. Her afterlife guide, Australian aborigine Phar Lap Jones, advises her to give up desire, but Lily wants another turn on the cycle of life and death. Self brilliantly uses Lily's marginal position to comment on a culture structured by the desire to desire. Through Lily's eyes, the reader is granted a vision of the West as a vast, glittering junkiedom. Lily's objection is not political, howeverDit is existential, an accusation of the inevitable failure of the flesh itself. Self's novel will surely figure on best-book lists this year. (Sept.)
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There's a lot of abusive palaver and not much substance in this labored third novel from the punk-surrealist author of Cock and Bull (1993), Great Apes (1997), and other fetchingly deranged assaults on good taste, convention, and stuff like that.One wants to admire an imagination that could conceive of this novel's afterlife-a rundown hinterland in which the dead hold jobs and intermingle more or less normally by the living-as experienced by its foul-mouthed narrator Lily Bloom (James Joyce is surely spinning peevishly in his grave), an American woman who dies of cancer in a London hospital. But Lily simply rattles on and on, about her two daughters, uptight Charlotte (who's infertile) and cokehead-whore Natasha ("Natty," who's anything but); her many marital and extra-curricular sexual frolics; the State of the World, as encapsulated in odd little throwaway observations ("Saddam invaded Kuwait and my girls indulged their own cravings"); and-most curiously-her relationship before and after death with fellow patient Phar Lap Jones, an affable aborigine (named after his country-creature, a famed racehorse) who covets Lily's false teeth, for which he bargains, promising to ferry her safely out of the land of the living. A few cheeky inventions amuse intermittently (sex is still available even after one has passed on, though Lily wryly notes that "live johns were numb to the dead hookers' insubstantiality"), but there simply isn't enough of a plot to justify even two hundred and fifty pages' worth of this jaded mockery. Nor is Lily much fun: she's a bundle of indignations, whose high-pitched rants accommodate far too many lame anti-Semitic gags (of course she's a Jew herself, so we're probably supposed to see the humor in her continual recourse to such conversational bytes as "D'jew know?" and "Mindjew").Sentence by sentence, it's smooth, even vivid-but the grossly overextended whole adds up to good writing wasted on an underimagined and tiresome premise. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It has become typical to compare Self to Jonathan Swift. If that's because of his misanthropic side and his outlandish scenarios, then the comparison is fair. The stage for Self's latest assault on readers is death--the final frontier, the bugaboo that haunts most of us. His mouthpiece is Lily Bloom. After a horrendous bout with breast cancer, Lily expires, leaving her two daughters, Natasha and Charlotte, to begin life's ultimate journey--the journey in the afterlife. In the course of the narrative, Lily is either dying, dead, dead for a number of years, or alive; these states of consciousness interchange from chapter to chapter and a few interludes throughout the novel. Ultimately, her story is an exploration of death and the myriad forms in which we think of it. It is, too, an angry exploration, for Lily's life (as most people's lives) has been a series of challenges offered up from her many sexual partners, her afflictions (mainly food and bad luck), and her children (dead, alive, or stillborn). And death is no end to these challenges. Oh no. This is a Will Self book, so the trials of life follow the dead, and forget all that business about hindsight being 20-20. Even the pounds Lily has shed and regained come along with her and form comic figures called the Fats. The satire is biting, even cruel, but like most well-conceived satire, it offers rich food for thought. Bonnie Smothers
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