ELAINE

The provocative British novelist imagines his mother’s complex inner life.

As a child, Self briefly lived in Ithaca, New York, where his father, John, taught at Cornell and his mother, Elaine, served as her husband’s well-read assistant. This book, covering roughly a year in the family’s life there in 1954 and 1955, is inspired by his mother’s diary and tracks Elaine as she ponders motherhood, squandered ambitions, and (especially) infidelity. She dwells on what she suspects about John, naturally, but also on her own flings, mainly with Ted Troppmann, one of John’s professorial colleagues. Marriage is just one institution that makes her feel constrained: The day-to-day business of running a household chafes, forcing her to suppress her own intellectual ambitions, and though she loves her preadolescent son, Billy, motherhood alone does little for her. Self has long been an admirer of the modernists, and stylistically this novel strongly recalls Mrs. Dalloway, as Elaine’s mind flits from place to place and an overall mood of dissatisfaction sets in (“bitterness, pain, confusion, and sadness in the sightless, senseless, grimacing face of the act of love”). It also gets deeply intimate with Elaine physically, from lust to migraines to periods to bouts of heavy drinking. The novel is a smart portrait of starchy academia and literary life (Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow have brief cameos) and how misogyny runs at the core of society, sometimes violently so. But its chief strength is as a showcase of a woman who’s had it up to here with good manners (she is “a diary keeper and a diary burner, an unfaithful wife and an unloving mother, an angry gouger and a hysterical screamer”). The digressive, at times rambling, prose that’s long been common for Self is present, but there’s no question that his chosen subject has focused his mind.

A striking study of a woman on the verge.