rickmcgrath.com
contact | home
SELF DISCOVERY: Tough, Tough Toys For Tough, Tough Boys: Unbreakables? By Will Self Bloomsbury Press, London, 1998 Reviewed By Rick McGrath I saw my first Will Self book at Waterstone's Books on Sauchiehall Street, in Glasgow, late last Spring.  I was looking for something new and interesting to take back to Canada for an author-collecting friend, and there it was on the signed first edition table: Tough, Tough Toys For Tough, Tough Boys. The cover is a masterpiece of marketing: Will Self booms out from the top of the page. His name is connected, set in white type on in a red rectangle.  The entire title fits under in army stencil. Beneath the selling of Self, a white 50s Mattel plastic sports car has arced in Ballardian symmetry out of a palm-filled sky to prang head-first into a sandcastle on a - where else? - yellow California beach. It's signed in Self's glyphic hand - both names magically condense into something that looks more like Zorro than anything else. Published in England by the hot Bloomsbury Press. It's an interesting introduction to a writer I don't know much about. This is his eighth book. His dust jackets reveal only his oeuvre and the fact he lives in London. He's won a prize and been nominated for another. Immaterial. His hair is much wilder than as revealed in his earlier books. He looks, in fact, like Peter Townsend of The Who. He looks Brit. He writes ironic sarcasm. Actually he writes about sex, drugs, and, well, psychiatry.  Why not. Us 60s experiencers were weaned on Freud, BF Skinner, Norman O. Brown,  RD Laing and the like. Overtaught as we were by zealous young instructors and jr. profs in the heady days of massive expansion of the seats of higher learning. But it's funny as hell and full of attutude. TTTFTTB was essentially written for other publications, and collected with a few new yarns. The book begins with a clever revelation on the London & Jamaican drug trade, called A Rock Of Crack As Big As The Ritz. It relies on ironic realism and what seems like an insider's knowledge of the trade to make it readable, and, as one discovers with Self, who obviously read a lot of Vonnegut, it continues on in the last story of the collection, called The Nonce Prize, in which our outer self hero of story one becomes an inner self hero in story 2. Ah, but such is the basis of true self discovery, no? In between are a mixture of tones, from the psychotic little horror story, Flytopia, in which the everyday bugs of our lives strike a rather gruesome deal with a very lazy husband, to the title story, which recounts a drunken, drugged, introspective night run in a Jag from Scotland to, well, almost London. The story title comes from a Mattel TV commercial. A tour de force of dialogue, our story tracks Bill, who picks up a sorry young hitchhiker and drives him almost over the brink with mind games. "Bill had been waiting for this, this descent into Mark's mind...(Mark was) someone whose capacity for self-love would only ever be manifested through attitudinising and narcissism. Bill thought that he quite hated Mark already." Nice guy. But he gets his in the end. By far, TTTFTTB is the mature story of the collection, with the deepest characterizations and most compelling psychological baggage. Other inclusions are "A Story For Europe", which offers up a Teutonic metaphor for the Euro business boys, "Dave Too", in which the psychological importance of being Earnest becomes similar for Davids, "Caring, Sharing", which introduces the idea of emotos, sensitive, child-like cuddlers who "care" for their human masters...and then discover love among themselves in secret worlds unknown to their emotionally-dead "grown-ups". Overall, some tasty stories covering a range of styles and characters. They are, typically, stories, with beginnings, middles and ends - no zany stuff - written in a clear vocabulary for the entertainment of his readers.  One could easily say, a good book by a writer at the self-assured stage of his career. © 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