The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys by Will Self
Paul Maliszewski

Will Self. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys. Grove, 1999. 244 pp. $23.00.

Will Self has never seemed to lack fictional premises, and the new collection of stories is no disappointment. In one, a man discovers a huge vein of crack cocaine underneath his London apartment and begins the slow, industrious work of mining it. In another, a man terrified, even angered, by the presence of insects in his home comes to achieve a macabre kind of détente with the bugs. In a monetarily unified Europe, a baby in England bosses around his bewildered parents in fluent business German, while in Munich a deputy director for Deutsche Bank is reduced to baby talk. A man who believes himself surrounded by people named Dave, some of whom have only recently and suspiciously changed their names to Dave, is asked, quite calmly, to change his to Dave too.
But while the premises of Self’s stories get the most attention, his fiction and its satiric qualities are severely diminished by any recitation of the daffy premises alone. Any of the above are ideas only and may seem indistinguishable from an episode of The Twilight Zone. By themselves they are all contrivance and mechanical juxtaposition. Satires, however, are more than a series of inventive premises; in Self’s case, the premise is only as good as the language that expresses it, and Self’s language continually surprises with its gradual unfolding and delights with each unexpected exaggeration and detail.
While many of Self’s earlier fictions have been set in London, here his references to London suburbs and the surrounding countryside have become more dense, his observations of livelihoods and daily habits more germane and particular to the satire. Self shows himself to be a fine observer of the people, commerce, and geography of individual neighborhoods, attuned to the manner in which cities fall and rise and fall again only in the space of a few blocks on the same street. [Paul Maliszewski]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys by Will Self Paul Maliszewski Will Self. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys. Grove, 1999. 244 pp. $23.00. Will Self has never seemed to lack fictional premises, and the new collection of stories is no disappointment. In one, a man discovers a huge vein of crack cocaine underneath his London apartment and begins the slow, industrious work of mining it. In another, a man terrified, even angered, by the presence of insects in his home comes to achieve a macabre kind of détente with the bugs. In a monetarily unified Europe, a baby in England bosses around his bewildered parents in fluent business German, while in Munich a deputy director for Deutsche Bank is reduced to baby talk. A man who believes himself surrounded by people named Dave, some of whom have only recently and suspiciously changed their names to Dave, is asked, quite calmly, to change his to Dave too. But while the premises of Self’s stories get the most attention, his fiction and its satiric qualities are severely diminished by any recitation of the daffy premises alone. Any of the above are ideas only and may seem indistinguishable from an episode of The Twilight Zone. By themselves they are all contrivance and mechanical juxtaposition. Satires, however, are more than a series of inventive premises; in Self’s case, the premise is only as good as the language that expresses it, and Self’s language continually surprises with its gradual unfolding and delights with each unexpected exaggeration and detail. While many of Self’s earlier fictions have been set in London, here his references to London suburbs and the surrounding countryside have become more dense, his observations of livelihoods and daily habits more germane and particular to the satire. Self shows himself to be a fine observer of the people, commerce, and geography of individual neighborhoods, attuned to the manner in which cities fall and rise and fall again only in the space of a few blocks on the same street. [Paul Maliszewski]

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