The Etruscans believed they could read the future in the sliced-up liver of a sacrificed animal. For Will Self, too, the liver is a textual organ, a tool of divination; only it is the past which is written there. Its scarrings and mottlings, its haemorrhages and infestations, document the private life – blackouts, brownouts, red mists and all – of its owner, or user. The liver is like a secret diary, its pages darkened by unmentionable jottings; or like Dorian Gray’s necrotizing portrait, stashed in the attic of our ribcages. Yet it also possesses mysterious powers of erasure and regrowth – though that may just free us to begin punishing it anew, learning nothing, forgetting nothing.

None of the livers in this quartet of longish short stories is in great shape. The regulars at a Soho drinking club (based, with what I would think was actionable precision, on the legendary topers of the Colony) take turns to degrade and destroy one another with strong drink and acid words. A cancer patient cuts a diseased relationship out of her life, and experiences an unexpected remission in Zurich. The Prometheus myth is retold in the not entirely Olympian setting of the advertising industry. A virus narrates the unedifying tale of a drug-users’ picnic in which the partygoers turn out to be the canapés. These are fatiguing people to be around for even a quarter of a book’s length – so what’s in it for us? All of Self’s hallmarks are in place here: a prose style that scuds from the slangy to the hypertrophic and back; a keen sense of place; a sharp satirist’s eye coldly cast on fashionable London; and a fondness for what might be called the High Concept. Earlier works have posed a series of what ifs: what if apes ran the art world; what if when you died you just moved to another part of London; what if the ravings of an emotionally unravelling London cabbie formed the incunabula of a post-apocalyptic religion? What, indeed, if Dorian Gray lived in fashionable London (present-day fashionable London, that is). In Liver, this fondness finds expression in a sometimes rather crunching elision of genres. Sour urban comedy warps into science fiction; media satire splices into myth. It is also evident in the overarching metaphors which, along with certain characters and settings, link the stories. The gavage, the force-feeding of a goose for foie gras, is alluded to several times in the first story; images of parasitism and incubation, as well as colonialism (or Colonialism) occur throughout. We – people – are hosts or shells, ransacked and strip-mined by our desires and appetites. We have no idea what is really going on in our hearts and lives. But once cut us open and there you will find our own personal reliable narrator, glistening obscenely (and obscenely appetizing, to the reader, as well, Self reveals, as certain more specialized consumers).

As usual, then, Liver is stuffed with good ideas, or at least suggestive ones. As usual, too, there is something slack in the execution. Self knows a lot about fashionable London. He also knows, or at least remembers, a fair bit about the phoney sodalities and sheer gibbering squalor of the serious drug user’s daily round. But Liver’s undeniable brio cannot disguise a feeling of hastiness, and a certain incuriosity.

An instructive parallel can be drawn with the late David Foster Wallace. He shared with Self a willingness to experiment with genre, pastiche and several other acutely artificial literary devices, as well as a sense of the grotesque, a liking for long words and a commitment to explore the particular miseries of a sharply drawn present (including addiction). But he struggled (and the struggle makes his work difficult to read sometimes, which Self’s, for all the long words, generally isn’t) to get beyond his cleverness and make something truthful and humane. He wrote about loathsome people with what reads a lot like love. Passages in his flawed masterpiece Infinite Jest discuss the hepatic pathology of substance abusers in the fastidiously medical language as Self uses here; but Foster Wallace would never have thought the liver more interesting than the life.

Will Self
LIVER
A fictional organ with a surface anatomy of four lobes
176pp. Viking. £18.99.
978 0 670 88997 6

Keith Miller is a freelance writer living in London. His book about St Peter’s Basilica was published last year.

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