Review by Booklist Review
Elaine Hancock has ambitions and aspirations, most of which are suffocated in the service of meeting the demands of her husband, John, a Cornell professor and Milton scholar, and the needs of their young son, Billy. When Elaine asks herself, "Is this it?", she articulates a common frustration of the 1950s housewife and, indeed, women throughout history. In fact, this story draws heavily on the diaries of Self's own mother. Elaine feels caged by her domesticity, suffers from postpartum depression, and smokes heavily. She also has an affair, fantasizes about John's colleagues, battles suicidal ideation, and imagines drowning Billy in the bathtub. John was obsessed with the battle between God and Satan. Elaine lived it ("if you feel the yawning mouth of the abyss--it can only be because you want to . . . fill it"). Self, the author of a dozen novels, including Phone (2017), and whose previous book was the memoir, Will (2020), draws a deft character study that balances social criticism (Elaine worries that John's ill-kempt, wrinkled shirt will get her labelled a slattern) with the strive toward personhood.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Self (Umbrella) draws on journals kept by his mother in the 1950s for a shattering portrait of a woman trapped by her domestic responsibilities and lingering "postpartum neurosis." Elaine Hancock describes her life in Ithaca, N.Y., with a "terrifying boundlessness of her own contempt." She's married to John Hancock, a pompous junior faculty member at Cornell, and is constantly at war with herself, battling "migraines and menses" and overwhelmed with loathing for her husband ("The front room is all his head.... His rear end squidges against the back wall of the kitchen... there's... no room for me!"). Elaine is mortified by her thoughts of harming their child, Billy, and feels excluded from the love he and John share, leaving her in search of someone to satisfy her sexual urges. When she falls for one of John's colleagues, her view of the affair mirrors her feeling about herself: "The whole thing is likely to explode at any moment." She's also a writer, but worries her work is no good. When she meets Vladimir Nabokov at a faculty party, he advises her with heartbreaking precision to "paint the bars of my own cage." Still, she views her writing as "nonviable... as some obstetrician might say of an embryo." Self pulls off a painfully authentic depiction of Elaine's interior life, doing justice to her fierce anger and sexual desire along with her fears and humiliations. This is a tour de force. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 recallsMrs. 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
