The Quantity Theory of Insanity

The author of the critically acclaimed My Idea of Fun and Cock and Bull returns with six short stories filled with absurdity, black humor, and satire and overflowing with weird, extraordinary ideas and bizarre images. 15,000 first printing.

With its U.K. publication in 1991, this collection of six morbidly funny stories of Thatcherite Britain secured Self's standing as the enfant terrible of English satirical fiction. As in last year's My Idea of Fun, Self's parodic style here hinges on flat, gullible, slightly ridiculous narrators, who serve both as picaresque vehicles for Self's sardonic critiques of English cultural life and filters for his manic, erudite prose. In the title story, a paranoid social scientist recounts in absurdly pretentious style how he arrived at his celebrated theory that "there is only a fixed proportion of sanity available in any given society." In "Understanding the Ur-Bororo," an anthropologist spends years studying an indigenous tribe in the Amazon basin only to discover that their distinguishing trait is that they are boring. In the rather affecting first story, "The London Book of the Dead," a bereaved narrator finds that his dead mother is living in a remote part of London. Events and names threaded through each tale hold together this uneven collection; steeped in grotesque metaphors, millenialist zeal and preposterous academic theories, it will surely appeal to Self's widening Stateside audience. Often downright misanthropic, it displays the young author's debts to the dissimilar satirical sensibilities of David Lodge and William Burroughs. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is Self's first book, an interconnected collection of stories published in England in 1991 but held back in the US until the moment Self attained trans-Atlantic culthood. Self (My Idea of Fun, p. 243, etc.) has previously proven his skill at phantasmagoria, but he's less impressive here. Sharply tweaking a spectrum of mental health and social work philosophies, Self is on a mission to point out that therapists who treat delusional problems are themselves the ones with the problems. In the title story, a mock academic paper, a psychology researcher explains how he came to discover the remarkably unscientific Quantity Theory--which holds that there's a fixed amount of sanity in any given society at any given time, and a small patch of insanity in one area of that society will result in a small patch of sanity elsewhere. (Eventually ``psychic field disruption,'' planned insanity to create sanity for someone else, becomes a popular self-help routine. It's just the karma theory, given a spin of European nihilism.) Self's working method for this collection becomes apparent too quickly: He hits on a kooky, half-true theory, then backs up into his parking space. But his stories are contrived in their efforts to shock us, and the ideas themselves are like outtakes from undergraduate stoner-philosopher what-if sessions. It's only when Self gets away from his adman mentality to really do some great, not readily marketable writing that we catch glimpses of his brilliance--as in ``Mono-Cellular,'' which shifts from a first-person account of experiencing life through the senses into fabulous elliptical blather, like the best of the late-period, whacked-out C‚line. Those sympathetic to Self's fantasies, which can be fun-house amusing, should read where he came from to know how much he's evolved. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

With these six sardonic tales, Self establishes himself as a first-rank satirist. In the title story, the originator of the renowned Quantity Theory of Insanity recounts the events surrounding its discovery and the disputatious history of his "school." In "The North London Book of the Dead," a young man learns what lies beyond death when he spots his deceased mother walking down a suburban London street. "Understanding the Ur-Bororo" concerns an anthropologist's studies of a remote Brazilian tribe whose distinguishing trait is their dullness; indeed, the tribe's name translates as "The People Who You Wouldn't Want To be Cornered by at a Party." Filled with acid wit and fresh, trenchant metaphors, these corrosive stories probe the terror hidden within the trivial. Recommended.
Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free PL, Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.