Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
I received William Burroughs's seminal (in more sense than one ) novel Naked Lunch as a form prize when I was fifteen. I read it with a distinct sense of horripilation, as if the vile secretions it described might ooze through the pages and the orgiastic rituals it depicted were subject to incorporation into my own, fevered imagination.Burroughs's influence on me as a writer has been impossibly confused with the impact of his writing. From his life I took the dubious message that in order to nurture a standpoint of fearless detachment -- from country, from class, from all allegiances -- it was permissible to indulge in the most irrational derangement of the senses. Yet while this was the pose, its enactment was one of steely-eyed perspicacity. If there was the Burroughs of Nova Express, Dead Fingers Talk, and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, willfully employing his unconscious as a test bed for the most exuberantly unpleasant of visions and ideas, then there was also the harsh empiricism of Junky to act as a corrective.
But the main lesson the gestalt of Burroughs's life and his work taught me was that there exists a sinister congruence between the control systems implicit in capitalist societies (with their obsessional manufacturing and their compulsiveconsuming) and the uncontrollable psyche of the drug addict. It was Burroughs's great contribution to twentieth-century literature to merge his own psychopathology with the collective malaise. Truly, to paraphrase his friend Jack Kerouac, he made us all look at what was on the end of our forks.
Synopsis
A brief and brilliant satire of magazine hacks and fashionistas, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis shows Will Self - a writer acclaimed as "a masterly prose-maker" by London's Sunday Times - at the top of his form. It looks as if it's going to be quite a Christmas for Richard Hermes, powdered with cocaine and whining with the white noise of urban derangement. Not so much enfolded as trapped in the bosom of the most venal media clique in London, Richard is losing it on all fronts: he's losing his heart to Ursula Bentley, a nubile and vacuous magazine columnist; he's in danger of losing his job at the pretentious listings magazine Rendezvous; he's losing his mind courtesy of Colombia's chief illegal export; and, worst of all, he's losing his soul ... to Bell. Bell is a newspaper columnist, radio host, television personality - but more than that, he is the kingpin guiding the ship of media scandal through the lower depths. From his headquarters in the Sealink Club he pulls the strings that control the disseminators of drek and gatherers of glib. And he has had Ursula Bentley and just about everyone else, female and male. As Richard pursues the Jicki perfume wafting from Ursula, he is in fact being drawn into a much more sinister web. Murky, paranoid, and hilarious, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis is Will Self at his best.