Sweet Smell of Psychosis [Paperback]

Will Self (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1997

It looks like it is going to be quite a Christmas for Richard Hermes, a Christmas powdered with cocaine and whining with the white noise of urban derangement. Not so much enfolded, as trapped in the bosom of the nastiest, most venal media clique in London, Richard is losing it on all fronts.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (very loosely based on Alexander Mackendrick's searing '50s movie Sweet Smell of Success) is the kind of mordant fable that Will Self could toss off in his sleep. But although it doesn't stretch Self's considerable talents, it is still a wonderfully poisonous entertainment.

Richard Hermes is a tiny cog in the London media machine, a hack whose only distinction is a tenuous position at the edge of the most powerful clique in town. At its heart is the loathsome Bell, a sort of malevolent anti-Oprah whose media omnipresence has given him enormous power.

...one of Bell's most sycophantic acolytes had established--through certain arcane statistical computations--that there must, logically, be at least two hundred thousand people in Britain who did nothing else but listen to Bell's voice, watch Bell's face, or read his words, for every waking hour of their lives.

Richard is drawn deeper into Bell's web in pursuit of the gorgeous Ursula Bentley, but he can't keep up with the clique's colossal appetite for controlled substances. He soon begins to slide into drug-addled madness, and Self once again demonstrates his uncanny ability to render altered states in perfectly crafted prose. In fact, much of the pleasure that The Sweet Smell of Psychosis has to offer comes not from the story of Richard's inevitable fall, but from Self's deft and playful way with words. Few writers in English are able to use such beautiful language to describe the most revolting things. Whether he's writing about an excruciating hangover or Bell's naked body ("each pap sporting a twistle of black, black hair",) Self's decadent language begs to be savored, even read out loud. Martin Rowson, the Hogarth to Self's Swift, provides some remarkable illustrations to accompany the text. Rowson's work (most recently showcased in his comic-book version of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) is grim and shadowy, but filled with detail and twisted humor. Together, he and Self have created an elegant billet-aigre to London's dark underbelly, a cautionary tale that takes pleasure in its own unpleasantness. --Simon Leake --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

British author Self (Cock & Bull; My Idea of Fun) is notorious for extremes of debauchery, and in his newest tale of one man's descent into vice and excess he teams up with political cartoonist Rawson, who provides sinister, nightmarish illustrations. This novella turns an innocent loose in the wicked city, London, refreshing a plot in essence as old as Petronius, and infusing it with Self's now nearly formulaic sex-and-drugs drollery. The innocent du jour is Richard Hermes, who has left a homely old northern city and a "homey, suety" girlfriend to Make It in London's media scene. That scene's center is the notorious news/media celebrity called, simply, Bell, who holds court at the Sealink Club, "a dark, humid environment in which fungal tittle-tattle could swell overnight." Richard is in love with an habitu? of Bell's set, Ursula Bently. Ursula is maddeningly sexy, world weary, and semiaddicted to whatever is going about. Richard's problem is that Bell's group, which cavorts around late night London, stopping in at opium dens and preening themselves in mirrors, is impinging disastrously on his health, moral sense and career. While the faint scent of Ursula's perfume, Jicki, is driving Richard mad with lust, Bell seems just to be driving Richard mad: he keeps seeing the hateful Bell's face on other people. Slowly, Richard makes inroads on Ursula's affections until finally he holds her naked in his arms. Of course, things go surrealistically wrong from that point on. This short book, while capped off with a somewhat stunted punchlinelike ending, will nevertheless provide readers with a mini-overdose of Self's signature detached licentiousness. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 92 pages
• Publisher: Trafalgar Square (May 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747531544
• ISBN-13: 978-0747531548
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,318,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "chewing the cocaine cud of nothing...", August 6, 2006

By 

My Uncle Stu (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Sweet Smell of Psychosis: A Novella (Will Self) (Paperback)

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis is classic Will Self. He has such a delightful and distinctive writing style. Sardonic, monstrously grotesque, twisted. And not without moments of cruelty. The story itself is almost irrelevant. I find myself reading and rereading certain passages, charmed by the sounds of the language yet nauseated by the sentiment. I end up looking up a lot of words, which slows me down. For any given word I didn't recognize, I wasn't sure if it is was a unique Self-neologism, British druggy underworld colloquialisms, esoteric vocabulary, or a reference that's over my head (I read the book on mostly on the run, circling words and phrases to later run through the good ol' Wikipedia, God I love that thing).

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis is a nice short novella, baroque and ornate as any of self's writing but linear in its narrative. It has short little sections punctuated by illustrations, just like the old chapter books I used to read in grade school. I like that. Like a rat pressing the lever in an old skinner box, I find myself reading faster, turning pages hoping for the intermittent reward of a illustration. Martin Rowson's illustrations certainly liven things up, (although I was a little self-conscious reading it in the heat-wave, rush hour train, packed in shoulder to shoulder, with vague paranoid ideation of people reading over my shoulder) much in the same way that Ralph Steadman's demented illustrations complemented the writings of Hunter S. Thompson.

The story sets itself within the post-post-modern world of media observing media, with our protagonist, Richard, being a self-loathing hack writer associating in the world of "media-associated subsidiary professionals." "They were transmitters of trivia, broadcasters of banality, and disseminators of dreck. They wrote articles about articles, made television programmes about television programmes..." (sic, as pertains to that unpleasantly odd British spelling) "They traifficked in the glibbest, slightest, most ephemeral cultural reflexivity, enacting a dialogue between society and its conscience that had all the resonance of a foil individual pie dish smitten with a paperclip." Richard is sinking deeper and deeper into the dopaminergic driven psychosis of cocaine abuse, and finds himself unable to separate himself from the gravitational field of Bell, a charismatic but treacherous talk show host, and Bell's sycophantic clique. Within that clique is Ursula, who Richard falls in love and the story is centered around Richard's attempts to connect with her and disconnect the both of them from Bell's vicious druggy world.

So, on some level, it is a quite charming boy-meets-girl love story. But with Self's unique style. For example, when a hung-over, burnt-out Richard gets a laugh from Ursula, "By God! He'd said something right! A thousand thousand pink flamingos lifted off from the volcanic lake of Richard's stomach." Two brief paragraphs later, when Ursula mentions her recent outing with Bell's gang, "The flamingos were machine-gunned by Nazi vivisectionists." Throughout the book, the decompensating unconscious of drug psychosis intermingles and fantastical subjectivity overtakes the real. I don't want to give away the brilliant ending, which surprised me both with its absurd humor and its intensity.

Thumbs up, buy this book. Tell a friend. Thank me later.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Short, Too Silly, October 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sweet Smell of Psychosis: A Novella (Will Self) (Paperback)

The author's command of and taste for the English language will keep me reading his books. Self's descriptive prose dead-on captures the complex psychology and the argot of his London Dead End Kids -- the jaded dope-addled, self-loathing predators that inhabit so much of his work. And Self does good chapters and stories but here, as evinced in his other novels -- longer formats tangle his feet and warp his sense of proportion. This novella, which was really too short to publish alone even with the lurid unclear cartoons as filler -- presents the main characters in wonderful detail up front and then drops all these potentially fecund interrelationships in favor of the hero's inexplicable quest to seduce the story's love interest. Then after exhausting egregiously a huge chunk of the story's double-spaced 90 pages on this quest, Self turns the whole thing into a bad episode of Tales from The Crypt and has the love interest transmogrify into the story's antagonist while coupling with the hero.

Your move.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars scathing, July 14, 2001

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sweet Smell of Psychosis: A Novella (Will Self) (Paperback)

This joyfully venomous novella, whose title invokes the excellent Burt Lancaster/Tony Curtis film Sweet Smell of Success (1957), is ostensibly intended to satirize the sorts of tabloid hack journalists who had enjoyed themselves so thoroughly at the expense of Martin Amis, Will Self's literary godfather, several years ago. But, perhaps just because I'm not British, there did not seem to be anything presslike about the characters; instead it seemed just a vicious, but worthwhile, savaging of the sort of amoral, ambisexual, drug-addled, sensation-chasers who are all too common in every walk of life and line of work these days.

Richard Hermes is an entirely minor features writer who has become caught up in the vortex of young journalists who revolve around Bell, a constant media presence known for bedding any man or woman he sets his eye on, sort of Larry King crossed with a satyr. Richard recognizes the emptiness of the lives the group leads, and still has a sufficient remnant of decency to be repelled by the acts of needless cruelty that they thrive on, however, he's fallen in lust with Ursula Bently, an icy blonde beauty, who hangs with this crowd, but whom he compares to "a diamond found in a gutter behind a Chinese takeaway."

Richard pays court to the intermittently receptive Ursula, and descends deeper and deeper into a paranoid cocaine-induced haze, in which everyone around him seems to resemble Bell. He harbors the improbable hope that Ursula is redeemable and that the two of them can break out of Bell's gravitational pull to live happily ever after. But in the end, even as he plans to get away from the City and Bell, to return home for the Christmas holiday, Richard finally gets his chance to bed down Ursula, though the experience proves less than heavenly.

If the book is intended to say something specific about the press, it escaped me entirely. No one actually seems to perform any kind of work in the book, it's all clubbing, drugging, drinking, and scrumping. But taken simply as a cautionary tale, a warning that by being with these people you become one of them and sink into the abyss, it worked well enough.

GRADE : B