Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys [Hardcover]

Will Self (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1999

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys is a new collection of corkscrewed tales from the author of last year's Great Apes. The London Guardian describes Will Self as "a wayward genius," and you can find out why when you observe the author's pitiless dissection of the foibles of men, women, and the Volvo 760 Turbo. Self's world is a no-fun house of warped mirrors. A man is seduced into a misanthropically charged symbiosis with the insects infesting his cottage - he has entered "Flytopia." In "A Story for Europe," a two-year-old English child utters his first halting works...in business German. In "Caring, Sharing," status-conscious New Yorkers navigate the perils of dating along with their very literal "inner children." In "The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz," a black Londoner discovers an enormous rock of crack cocaine underpinning his house - and quickly turns it into an efficient little empire. In the title story a psychoanalyst strips away all the sangfroid of his professionalism to find beneath...precisely nothing. And in the short novella "The Nonce Prize," a man framed for a sex crime he didn't commit finds that his only way out is to win a short-story competition. Sharp, funny, and packed with verbal fireworks, Tough, Tough Toy for Tough, Tough Boys confirms once again Will Self's stature as one of the most accomplished and original writers of his generation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Will Self's tabloid-friendly reputation as a connoisseur of proscribed substances should not obscure the fact that he can write many of his contemporaries under the table. His latest collection, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, is filled with typically Selfish confections: gritty chunks of reality wrapped in a sweet shell of exquisitely funny and intelligent writing. Admittedly, some of the stories here feel a little underdeveloped, as if the author were flexing his literary muscles and showing how easily he can make highbrow style dirty-dance with his lowbrow obsessions, but even the least of them is a bravura performance by an expert wordsmith. Self's obvious pleasure in bringing his extraordinary talents to bear on the seamiest of subjects is irresistible: the description of a crack cocaine rush that closes the first story, for example, is quite possibly more intoxicating than the drug itself.

But the greater part of the book complements that dazzling style with deeper pleasures. As he ranges from the hilarious tale of a remarkable infant who babbles in business German ("Bemess-bemess-bemessungsgrundlage!") to a troubled psychiatrist's journey toward the abyss, Self shows an uncanny knack for mixing realism and absurdity. The closing piece, a short novella about a wrongly convicted sex offender's attempt to win a short-story prize, is the most assured of all. In this author's hands, the barely articulate conversations of career criminals are transformed into poetry, and the struggles of the central character are both moving and wickedly funny:

In prison, in the English winter, the word crepuscular acquires new resonance, new intensity.... For here and now is an eternity of forty-watt bulbs, an Empty Quarter of linoleum, and a lost world of distempered walls. It's an environment of corridors and walkways, a space that taunts with the idea of progression towards arrival; then delivers only a TV room full of modular plastic chairs and Styrofoam beakers napalmed by fag ends.

In Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys Will Self shows once again that he's someone to be reckoned with. The kind of writer a society needs, he uses his wit as a crowbar to pry open the cracks in our culture. --Simon Leake

From Publishers Weekly

Although the title piece in this collection of eight stories by the ever-inventive Self (Great Apes, etc.) is uncharacteristically realistic, in many others Self's signature surreality, inventive wordplay and altered states of consciousness conspire to give contemporary English satire a good Swiftian kick. Often Self's imaginative extravagances, with their obvious, satisfying hooks, serve as odd contrasts to the brash, merciless critiques of drug addiction that frame the collection. The opening story, entitled "The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz," introduces readers to a pair of London brothers who discover that the foundation of their house is made of crack cocaine and who embark on an infinitely profitable drug-dealing enterprise. Danny, who won't smoke the stuff, puts his addicted younger brother, Tembe, to work for him. The arrogant rise and desperate fall of each brother is fluidly documented as their story continues in "The Nonce Prize," where Danny is framed for a vicious crime of pedophilia. A gritty snapshot of the British prison system unexpectedly gives way to a twisted satire on creative writing courses and literary prizes. Other stories feature terra firma settings with winningly uncanny characters, such as an English toddler who speaks only Gessh?ft Deutsch in "A Story for Europe"; the 12-foot-tall empathic na?fs wealthy Manhattanites depend on for infantile human comfort in "Caring, Sharing"; or the human-insect housemates in "Flytopia." In the tense title story, about a psychiatrist in mid-burnout driving manically across Great Britain, Self cleverly meshes this character's misanthropic alienation with the skank of a doppelg?nger hitchhiker. But of course Self's cleverness is already familiar to his readers; this collection demonstrates that his prowess with the distinctly nonfantastic can be as gripping as his most disturbing hallucinogenic visions.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 244 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr; 1ST edition (May 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802116442
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116444
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,115,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Many Deft Touches, July 2, 1999

By 

robert konrath (new orleans) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Hardcover)

The story, "Flytopia" is the standout entry in this collection. It's a wonderful miniature -- proportioned exquisitely, rhetorically balanced, a near-perfect short story. And yup, Self shares talents with Nicholson Baker: they both render griping dark fantasies, have a fine sense for physical detail, and fret over style. Baker writes more mechanically precise and tighter prose. Self has a darker outlook and uses a bit heavier, richer vocabulary (in part, because he throws British slang into the mix.)

With the exception of a fatuous, painfully wiredrawn story about a German-speaking British baby ("A Story for Europe"), the tales in this anthology are very good. About half the book is taken up with a story and a novella that both concern the same two black British brothers. In these, you'll learn tons more than you need (or want) about crack smoking and British jails, but you'll love the characters and their predicaments. Self's stories and characters are not slick or especially predictable and that adds to their charm.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better without the gimmicks, May 12, 2002

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self) (Paperback)

Will Self borrows a gimmick used by Kafka, Borges, and in one not-very-succesful story by Fitzgerald (A Diamond as Big as the Ritz) and, to some extent, used in all science fiction. An impossible or supernatural event is treated naturalistically, or accepted deadpan without comment by the characters.(Isaac Asimov Magazine stories do this well).
Another trademark, reminiscent of the dirty Scottish shock-writers, is descriptions of drug and alcohol use from the point of view of the user. He also favors effects that used to be called Grand Guignol and are now called splatterpunk.
These devices are used as the hinges of his plots and the entertainment values of his stories often depends on how compelling you find them. Apart from them he is a witty and perceptive satirist with some wonderful prose such as his description of the small Suffolk town "landlocked by the shifting dunes of social trends" where "the landlords of the three desultory pubs on the main street drew pints for themselves in the cool, brown, afternoon interiors of their establishments."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful contemporary fiction with few weaknesses, June 9, 2007

By 

Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self) (Paperback)

Will Self described a book by Bret Easton Ellis (The Informers) as '(taking) us from the first to the seventh circles of hell, from Salinger to De Sade'. This collection is more character based and plot driven than his previous collections - the Quantity Theory of Insanity and Grey Area. In the final story, a prison creative writing instructor urges the inmate scribblers that stories must have 'a beginning, a middle and an end', and Self seems to have taken his own fictional character's instruction on board to reign in some of his earlier, wilder metafictional techniques. Still, he remains true to his long term fictional project: to skewer the hypocrisies, the shibboleths and the complacency of Millenial capitalism and society with powerful, disturbing imagery.

The range is impressive. Self scans the top and bottom of society - with everything in between. The collection is bookended by two drug stories: 'The rock of crack as big as the Ritz', parodying the famous Fitzgerald story, where two black Londoners find their Harlesden house is underpinned by a gigantic rock of crack which they sell to wealthy Iranian bankers, and 'The Nonce Prize'in which one of the brothers, Danny, is framed for a horrific paedophile murder and takes to creative writing amongst sex offenders in prison. These two stories cover classic Self themes: the high and low life of London society, and the desire to throw a brick through the stately Edwardian rectory window of much contemporary fiction (would Beryl Bainbridge write about a paedophile murder? I doubt it). In between are a variety of stories that cover the grizzly terrain of modern life, featuring Self's trademark Swiftian ideas of scale, and psychological strangeness:

In 'Design Faults in the Volvo 760', Bill Bywater, a London psychiatrist has to face up to his anxieties at being an urban adulterer, feeling himself a giant King Kong-esque monster straddling the Westway flyover with Serena, his mistress, tiny in his hand. Bill is reprised in the magnificent title story - an escape from Self's usual fictonal terrain of raddled urban London - as he drives south through the rain spattered Scottish landscape from his Orkney Islands bolt hole with a benefit scrounging, hopeless case, hitchiker who forces Bill to face fully the masculine authority of his vocation and hedonistic lifestyle and examine the hollow centre within.

In 'Flytopia' a lonely indexer in a boiling hot cottage in a desultory East Anglian village finds himself entering into a strange symbiosis with the insects in his house, who end up helping him out with a spot of bother with his wife.

'Caring Sharing' - one of the less effective stories in the collection as it is merely the unravelling of a basic conceit, is a cyberpunk style tale of spoilt Manhattanites: 'These types were always on the verge of exhibiting, publishing, constructing, filming or presenting something, but never actually managed it.' - who transfer their infantile emotional needs onto giant emotos, who end up pursuing their own furtive sex lifes, while the adults aren't looking.

'Dave Too' deals with the problem of nomenclature - how to function in a world where everyone is called Dave. This again highlights one of Self's weaknesses - his tendency to pursue a conceit at the expense of character, though the psychiatrist, Dr Klagfarten, is a classic Self depiction - a wierdo, at the forefront of human neuroses, in his surrealist officee: 'If a fork like prop for a Magritte painting were to be plunged through the window of Dr Klagfarten's office, a gush of yellow neurosis would undoubtedly ooze out'.

'A Story for Europe' is a topical tour de force. Written at the time when all Euro-zone national financial arrangements were converging to prepare for the Euro single currency, it tells two parallel tales: in a liberal London home, Humpy the baby begins to say his first words: 'Wir mussen expandieren!' - simultaneously, over in the glass and steel financial district of Frankfurt, a respectable German financier is losing his marbles. The ending is predictable, as is the point made, but the story is great fun.

Will Self's fiction is not for everyone. He is a comic satirist of the most pungent form - Swift, Mencken, Bill Hicks, Self is in that tradition. As the publisher's note on the dust jacket says: A nasty, heartless compendium of the muddy foreshore and the abysmal depths of the human psyche. Order your diving bell now.