rickmcgrath.com
contact | home
SELF ANALYSIS The Quantity Theory Of Insanity, Together With Five Supporting Propositions: It's Just A Theory By Will Self Bloomsbury Press, London, 1991 Reviewed By Rick McGrath Whoa. Big name brands on the back cover: Martin Amis compares Self to JG Ballard and David Lodge; Doris Lessing exhalts the satirist; The Guardian gushes; Details gives an overview; and the NYT Book Review scatters names like rose petals: Nabokov, Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo. Heady stuff. And it is heady, as Self delves deep within the frontal lobes in this, his third of eight books and first collection of short stories. And it is fun, as characters are introduced who will recur over and over in his later work - Vonnegutian Trouts who swim in and out of Self's rushing rivers of ideas to lend to the reader's sense that all his stories are but one large encyclopedia of names, ideas, crazies and loonies, all fixated on Self's holy trinity of sex, drugs and psychiatry. And in this case, anthropology. Aside from a few square pegs, the round holes in this collection stem from the fictitious Ur-Bororo, a punnish tribe of South American natives who are, well, the most boring peoples on Earth. One of their traditional sayings - However far you may travel in this world, you will still occupy the same volume of space - informs all six stories with its REM-like stand in the space where you live-type simplicity. You start your journey in London, with the first story: The North London Book Of The Dead.  Here you discover your dead mother is still around, albeit not alive, and you visit her in a part of North London where all dead people live out some surprisingly boring afterlife. No doubt a very unsubtle dig at the real place, but who's visited? Ward 9 follows, and again Self digs a bit into the horror genre, conjuring a quasi-Ballardian character who realizes the prison camps of the psychotic mind are something to be drawn to, not escaped from... Understanding the Ur-Bororo is the next tale, and it's an extremely funny story of how not to make it as a anthropologist by studying the most unlikely collection of boors imaginable. All of which leads to the title story - almost a mini-novella in length, that is a tour de force of clever twists on the nittiness of academics, the nuttiness of research, and the nattiness of Self's satire on the learned set in general. The Quantity Theory of Insanity itself is so self-evident as to be brilliant: there is only so much sanity and insanity in the world. When someone sane becomes less sane, someone insane gets saner. The collollary is that this works for any smaller, definable group. Like the people you work with. At the bar. At the game. The point being made is realism for today's young PhDs - you ain't gonna make it unless you develop an idea you can flog. And it goes on and on from there. Like old Colin Wilson rants, it even has a bibliography for added realism. Har har. There are two more stories: Mono-Cellular and Waiting, both of which continue in the psychological vein...as the balance point between sanity and insanity shifts back and forth among the characters, with the tiny quantity of sanity staying the same. Overall, one of Self's best creations. Read it for the title piece alone. And stay self-centered. ©Rick McGrath 2000 MORE REVIEWS Movies: Jack Hill - Pit Stop Jack Hill - Spider Baby Sam Fuller - Shock Corridor Curtis Harrington - Night Tide Jack Hill - Switchblade Sisters Jack Hill - The Swinging Cheerleaders Sam Fuller - Meanest Men In The West Robert Frank - Rolling Stones' Cocksucker Blues Maysles Brothers - Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter Various Shorts - Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life Jason and Brett Butler - Alive & Lubricated and Bums Robert Fantinatto - Echoes of Forgotten Places Television: Patrick McGoohan - The Prisoner Features: Bohren und der Club of Gore - Drilling For Doom. And Finding It. Bohren und der Club of Gore - Geisterfaust. Not Your Average Ghost Story These Boots Were Made For Burnin' - The Bootleg Collector's Obsession Music Concert DVD: Sheryl Crow - Rockin The Globe Live Steely Dan - Two Against Nature Music CD: Sade - Lovers Live Sade - Lovers Rock Sade - The Best Of Sade Phil Manzanera - Vozero Roger Waters - In The Flesh Steely Dan - Two Against Nature Lamya - Learning From Falling Shania Twain - Up! Books: Will Self - Grey Area Will Self - My Idea of Fun Will Self - Great Apes Will Self - Junk Mail JG Ballard - High-Rise Gregory Benford - Cosm Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity Will Self - Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys