Standing in the road outside her suburban home in Ithaca, New York, Elaine asks herself, is this it? How has her life come to this? Elaine is the central character in Will Self’s latest novel and it is tempting to ask how much she is based on the intimate diaries kept for more than 40 years by Self’s Jewish-American mother, Elaine Rosenbloom. The novel follows Elaine’s life for almost two years, from 1954 to 1955, a few years before Self was born in 1961. One of the novel’s greatest strengths is the way it captures the feel of a small academic town in upstate New York in the mid-Fifties.
It is full of knowing references to race relations, Kinsey’s pioneering work on sexuality, Miltown (a popular tranquilizer at the time) and psychoanalysis, then enjoying its heyday. Elaine notices “the language of psychoanalysis creeping into ordinary speech and commonplace prose..
. everyone’s doing it”. The novel is full of cocktail parties where everyone drinks and smokes enormously and men and women alike pursue adulterous affairs.
Parenting seems half-hearted, to put it mildly. There are fascinating cameo appearances by Saul Bellow and especially the Nabokovs (he published his most famous work, , the year after his appearance in the novel) and telling references to the antisemitism of the time. The novel, though, is Jewish lite.
There are plenty of Jewish names. Elaine’s analyst is called Dr Freudenberg, there are characters called Rosenthal, the Goldbergs, she sees a do.