My Idea of Fun, A Cautionary Tale - Hardcover

Self, Will

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747515913 ISBN 13: 9780747515913

Publisher: NY Atlantic Monthly 1993., 1993

Synopsis

The story of a devilishly clever international financier/marketing wizard and his young apprentice, My Idea of Fun is both a frighteningly dark subterranean exploration of capitalism run rampant and a wickedly sharp, technically acute display of linguistic pyrotechnics that glows with pure white-hot brilliance.

Ian Wharton is a very ordinary young man until he is taken under the wing of a gentleman known variously as Mr. Broadhurst, Samuel Northcliff, and finally and conclusively simply as the Fat Controller, Loud-mouthed, impeccably tailored, a fount of bombastic erudition, the Fat Controller initiates Ian into the dark secrets of his arts -- of marketing, money, and the human psyche -- and takes Ian, and the reader, on a wild voyage around the edges of reality.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Blackly comic, comically erudite and perversely bloody." -- Boston Globe

"Dazzling.... An unforgettably soul.... Self leaves little doubt that we are in the presence of a gifted and courageous mind." -- Miami Herald

From Kirkus Reviews:

The first novel from Self (the novella, Cock and Bull, 1993), a British writer of considerable ingenuity and perversity. A dinner-party question (``What's your idea of fun?'') and Ian Wharton's shocking mental response occasion the memoir of a deranged (or perhaps superhuman) man in the moments before he aborts his wife's baby. Wharton grows up in the Sussex town of Saltdean with an overprotective, social-climbing mother and the specter of an absent, bad-penny father. He discovers that he has an eidetic memory: His brain involuntarily freezes images for permanent retention, and he can ``enter'' the frozen images--a bit like a virtual-reality experience. A stout, imposing older man named Broadhurst, who likes to be called The Fat Controller and is also eidetic, adopts Ian as a pupil and eventually becomes an oppressive Svengali. Strange, psychedelic set pieces accumulate, culminating in Ian's recognition that The Fat Controller is godlike. After some icily perverse, mind-bending episodes (readers will remember an eidetic scene during sex involving Ian's first love and the boorish interruption of The Fat Controller), the novel abandons the tension of its effectively freaky narrative and becomes a fancy-pants writing exercise in sick fantasia. The grotesque sequences are cool, but strangely imitative of William S. Burroughs's iconography: junkies, cartoon sex and violence, evil doctors, capacious realms of the subconscious. In the second half, Ian gets an education and goes to work for a successful marketing agency, during which time he is routinely analyzed by another controlling force: a junkie-ward psychiatrist named Hieronymus Gyggle. With some slapdash juxtapositions of drug-addict mentality and business-marketing philosophy, the novel concludes, likely leaving readers with an expanded vocabulary (``ataraxy,'' ``saccade,'' ``intercrural,'' ``strabismus'') but also grasping for meaning. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: NY Atlantic Monthly 1993.
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0747515913
• ISBN 13: 9780747515913
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309