Phone

October 23, 2017
In the hefty stream-of-consciousness conclusion to Self’s ambitious trilogy (Umbrella, Shark), disconnected narratives collide, bringing long-hidden secrets to light. Zachary Busner, a retired psychiatrist, embarks on a spiritual journey that requires him to come to terms with the Alzheimer’s blurring his reality. Despite his criticism of modern technology’s emphasis on data-gathering, he carries a constantly ringing smartphone with him, programmed by his autistic, technology-adept grandson to provide him with an illusion of continued independence. Meanwhile, Jonathan De’Ath, a British intelligence officer who goes by the moniker “The Butcher,” falls in love and pursues a furtive long-term relationship with a handsome, closeted soldier named Gawain. As Gawain rises through the army ranks and Jonathan’s carefully kept records of their phone booth conversations and remote bed-and-breakfast liaisons build, they weigh the consequences of keeping their affair hidden. Self’s densely cerebral prose leaps between narratives, disregarding linear storytelling and paragraph breaks in favor of extended musings that are often intelligent and periodically insightful. It’s less than subtle, however, in how heavily it hammers home messages about the dehumanizing impacts of war, screen-based communication, and psychological wounds that have never fully healed. But then again, Self hasn’t built his career on subtlety. Agent: Jeffrey Posternak, The Wylie Agency.

November 1, 2017
Zack Busner returns, and, "tired and confused," he's melting away into air as the world goes mad in Self's (Shark, 2014, etc.) magnum opus.Zack, who has appeared in many of Self's stories and novels, including Great Apes and Umbrella, is losing his mooring to the world, so much so that his withdrawn grandson has given him a cellphone so he can keep in touch. "You don't gotta have an abstract sorta noise-thingy," explains the grandson of the ringtone. "You can download a tune, or even someone singing an old pop song." The cellphone is endlessly noisy. After a stream-of-consciousness opening, Self locates kindred phones in the hands and pockets of other players, notably recurrent character Jonathan De'Ath, an intelligence agent known as "the Butcher," who ponders the whole business of "waiting for a lover, an agent, an asset--a phone call." He's not so bad, protests De'Ath; it's his closeted, hidden boyfriend, Gawain Thomas, a military officer who has served around the world and seen combat in plenty of unhappy places, who's done the real misdeeds. Zack, who has done specialized work in healing the psychic wounds of war veterans, is heading down the road of dementia; he still has the presence of mind, though, to puzzle over things like autism ("a canary of the coalmine of the human condition") and the mysteries of memory ("dreams and emotions all deformed by the decades they'd spent buried deep in the system"). Meanwhile, De'Ath and Thomas wrestle with demons of their own in Self's onrushing narrative, more than 600 pages without a paragraph break, inside which nothing much happens but a lot gets talked and thought about. Self makes subtle nods to modernist classics such as Ulysses along the way, unironically making Zack a kind of Leopold Bloom, though in his anxieties and preoccupations he could be someone from the pages of Howard Jacobson.A multilayered, multivocal, and long-awaited pleasure for the Self-absorbed.

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Starred review from November 1, 2017
Self readers will know Zack Bussner as the once cutting-edge, controversial psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of mental-trauma patients in Self's previous novels Umbrella (2013) and Shark (2014). Now retired, he is the patriarch of a large family with its own range of mental and physical problems, from a son with schizophrenia to a grandson with autistic tendencies. His newest desire is to become a Brahmin, but Zack is slowly descending into his own mental chaos with the onset of dementia and his present is now ever confused with his past. Elsewhere, Jonathan De'Ath, of the Secret Intelligence Service, a British spy better known as the Butcher, has the uncanny ability to obfuscate all those he meets while remembering minute details with computer precision. Jonathan's most thorough and uncracked secret, and his most cherished one, is his longtime love affair with Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, and seemingly exemplary military man. The characters' stories unfold in abruptly ever-changing settings and viewpoints, with Zack's mind and Jonathan's affair trending toward entropy until an evolving unification of situations brings everything finally, and satisfyingly, into focus. The final installment in Self's trilogy is an invigorating and challenging union of politics, history, and literary finesse.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 15, 2017

Few John Updike fans would enjoy Self's splintered, swirling narratives. Yet drug-addled psychiatrist Zach Busner, a recurring character in Self's fiction, is startlingly similar to Updike's Rabbit Angstrom in his inability to process new forms of eroticism and spirituality as the stability of a world founded in modernist principles crumbles around him. Here, in the final book of the trilogy begun with Umbrella and Shark, Self probes the absurdity of the information age through two seemingly disparate narratives: the trials and tribulations of a wayward spy engaged in an affair with a tank commander, and the struggle of Zach's family to provide for him as he ages. Set against the backdrop of the Second Gulf War, Self's story lines are folded into a meditation on the meaning of a "double life" in a technology-soaked era. Bewildered by a world of spiritual decay and hyperconnectedness, Zach (like Rabbit) ultimately runs from himself. VERDICT The narrative reads and feels like an endless data stream, underscoring Self's deliberate attempt to bury the reader in an avalanche of information. A sardonic end to Self's modernist trilogy.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., NY

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