What do You think about The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis: A Novella (1999)?
I'm not sure the term novella even applies here: it feels like a shaggy dog story or even just a 90 page set up to a vulgar joke. It manages to be playful (in a grim and utterly sardonic way) as well as obscene at the same time. The people, events and even the vocabulary itself seem to revel in their own gratuity. I just didn't see the worth in delving into such a seedy and mean-spirited world.
—Paul Blakemore
a less imaginative Martin Amis book with a lot more alliteration. the fish in the barrel meet the expected fate. "Self is sometimes presented as a bad-boy outsider, writing, like the Americans William S Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr, about sex, drugs and violence in a very direct way. Yet he is not some class warrior storming the citadels of the literary establishment from the outside, but an Oxford educated, middle-class metropolitan who, despite his protestations to the contrary in interviews, is about as much at the heart of the establishment as you can get, a place he has occupied almost from the start of his career." --Nick Rennison
—Jim
Will Self's nasty little novella puns its title off of the American noir classic The Sweet Smell of Success (which, to my noir-loving shame, I have yet to watch), but goes down a much sleazier and anatomically repulsive rabbit hole (I assume) than any that Burt Lancaster or Tony Curtis went down in that flick. Richard Hermes is a young reporter who falls under the thrall of Bell, a real villain of a media personality, and his cabal of sycophantic hack newsmen, all of who do double duty as his personal henchmen and fellow revelers in debauchery. Richard seems like a decent-enough bloke, but like all men, will turn into a cartoon wolf and sell his soul for a piece of ass. Doing piece of ass duty is Ursula Bentley, a ghoul of a male sex fantasy that Richard has convinced himself is actually a good person, even though she hangs out with a bunch of cruel, decadent, drug-fueled human slugs. Soon Richard is forced to make the hard choice between getting laid or retaining some piece of his humanity.Self tells a fairly condensed and Faustian cautionary tale that serves as a machine-gun volley of potshots at the journalism biz, all the while writing with his usual pizazz for learned diction and alliteration. The easily offended and grossed-out need not apply, but fans of mordant laughs and clever wordplay should check out the knowingly pulpy The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis, along with Self's other unpleasant entertainments, such as the two tales of hermaphroditic horror, Cock and Bull Bonus Features:Political Satirist Martin Rowson litters the pages with grotesque renderings of all the worst scenes in the book.
—Anthony Vacca
