Go ahead and open his `Mail'
RIGHT from the get-go, it's clear that "Junk Mail," British novelist Will Self's grab bag of nonfiction pieces, will not induce boredom pangs. You want a grabber? Try this opening on for size, from the book's first piece: "A journalist friend of mine asks me to take her out on the street and show her some crack dealing in action."
Consider this a stern warning if you are expecting to read genteel musings on the great 19th century French social realists or some such thing. Self, who has acquired a well-earned rep as one of England's least reverent and most inventive writers, seems to care not a whit if he's working under the banner of respectable British papers such as the Observer and the Independent. He's still going to write whatever he wants, as evidenced by the 31 articles collected here (some of which have appeared in two British collections, "Feeding Frenzy," and another, also called "Junk Mail").
"New Crack City" is a tautly written journey among London's crack dens and the flat of his dealer bud, where Self happens upon a young man "incongruously dressed in a velvet-collared crombie
When Self is commissioned to write catalog copy for the notorious British painter and ex-junkie Sebastian Horsley, he comes up with a rather lovely and strange story called "Scab" about a self-mutilator (Horsley? The author?) being treated in a hospital for his "ovoid
What does it mean? Who knows, but it's pure pleasure. "Junk Mail" is the rare file-clearing collection that you'll want to read front to back without skipping anything, so nourishing is Self's exuberant and savagely intelligent prose.
At the risk of sounding like an obnoxious anglophile, this is exactly the kind of high-risk, high-reward reportage that we don't see enough of in mainstream American print publications. The writer plunks himself into these stories, New Journalism-style, without coming off like some solipsistic jerk; he never sacrifices the story for his own self-regard. That's a tricky balancing act and it yields great work.
The book's travelogues are worth savoring for their numerous digressions. A trip to a Sufi festival in Konya, Turkey, to see the whirling dervishes becomes an excuse to rant about the hollow ring of "spiritual tourism" in which "trivial pleasures" are extracted "from the profundities of other cultures."
