Junk Mail

April 17, 2006
This uneven catchall for a decade's worth of previously published critiques, interviews and essays by British novelist Self (The Quantity Theory of Insanity
) roams from "ultimate rock chick" Marianne Faithfull to avant-garde artist Tracey Emin, who draws herself masturbating, to his "hero" Oscar Wilde, whose London statue has been repeatedly vandalized. Self is at his cantankerously witty best when pondering his own sexual ambivalence and his parents' open marriage as he interviews a transsexual law professor who sued unsuccessfully for parental rights, tours the London drug scene, discusses Americans' "strange way of thinking" with J.G. Ballard or realizes, on a visit to Israel, that he is a Jewish anti-Semite. Less successful is a dated interview with the late radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who laments her "invisibility" on the American political scene as opposed to her popularity in Europe and calls President Clinton a rapist. Also past their sell-by dates are a churlish, envious review of Nick Hornby's bestselling novel High Fidelity
and an interview with Martin Amis that retreads the novelist's fearless support of Salman Rushdie, the breakup of his marriage and his rivalry with Julian Barnes. And conspicuously absent from this literary grab bag is a preface that ties the varied pieces together into a coherent whole.

June 1, 2006
Should a writer's works carry an expiration date? That's a question worth considering in the midst of British novelist Self's new collection of essays and interviews, many of which are at least a decade old. Self holds forth on a slew of well-worn topics: drugs in Amsterdam, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi, literary bad boy Martin Amis. Too often his rants verge on the gratuitous (a review of Nick Hornby's " High Fidelity "seems inordinately snarky), and his abundant use of local colloquialisms will have readers longing for a guide to British slang. Still, Self skillfully skewers politics and popular culture (in a conversation with novelist J. G. Ballard, he laments a banal future in which the world becomes "a Switzerland of the soul"), and fans of his fiction will find much to appreciate here. The "junk" in the title likely refers to heroin; Self himself is a former addict. Although the theme of substance abuse doesn't predominate here, multiple references to William Burroughs notwithstanding, it's the closest thing this cranky collection has to a unifying theme.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)