Customer Reviews

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

Self and Rowson make a pungent pair - both left wing, media London establishment jesters as writer and cartoonist respectively, they team up in this short novella to paint a verbal and visual zeitgeist crusher of a book. The story is a simple one, not a bit of it cannot be found in some other tale or parable somewhere: naive, northern boy leaves his miserable life in the north with his 'girlfriend tending towards parturition, and small flat that would have required partition' to try and make it in the cocaine blasted world of media London as journalist for Rendezvous - one of those listings magazines that claims to surf the very tip of the cultural wave with weekly listings for tedious avant-garde cultural events.

Richard, our hero, finds himself drowning in a sea of drugs and superficiality. His nemesis, Bell, is a modern media baron - a promiscuous womaniser and hairsuite sex god. Mixing excessive substance abuse with paranoid affection for Ursula Bentley - a sort of twenties decadent siren reconstructed afloat on the pillow of narcotics in 90s central London, Richard finds his crush on the flighty Ursula growing with his cocaine fuelled paranoia about seeing Bell's face everywhere he goes. Richard has the nub of goodness within him, bless him. His wish is to make a genuine connection with Ursula, lift her and her tedious sex column out of this ephemeral dirge of media London to a married life of meaning and permanence. Ursula merely ruffles his hair and calls him 'sweet'. The twin poles, and scents of Ursula's perfume 'Jicki' and Richard's psychosis - entwine and grow as the novella roars to a swift and surreal denoument.

So the story is basically a bog standard modern parable of values being important than drugs, beautiful people and glamour blah blah. But the style - Self's amphetiminic and thesauras powered prose and Rowson's Hogarthian grotesque cartoons is to be savoured.

never read a book/story quite like this. the words and descriptions self uses are unique and powerful, his biggest strength in the novel. a fast and dark story that unfolds in a rather shocking ending. i wish it was longer; its only shortcoming. the artful drawings in the book are hilarious/fascinating. don't hesitate to pick up this prize.

I can't put my finger on why I didn't like this book. I like his other books (Great Apes and Grey Matter are great). You can't help, but feel dirty after reading a book like this, yet there was little humor or even interesting perspective to lighten the blow. I found this to be creepy and not in a good way. Maybe I was just in a bad mood...

IT was amazing to read a book that through it's title gives you the clue that this book will be wierd, but to still be taken aback at how twisted the reels of faces can become when reading such a well written book.