Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

First published in the UK in 2010; published in the US by Grove Press on May 3, 2011

Walking to Hollywood is the kind of novel that usually annoys me: the writer is a character in the book, interacting with others who exist in the real world. Novels of that ilk usually come across as self-indulgent acts of conceit, no matter how self-deprecating the author manages to be. After a promising start, this one proved to be no exception.

Each of the novel's three sections portrays Will Self as suffering from a mental disorder. Self managed to win me over in the hilarious first section, in which his fictional alter-ego is obsessive-compulsive to a fault. Lost in Self's maddening prose, I never stopped being entertained for long enough to become annoyed. Among other coping strategies, Self takes photographs "to confirm that the world and I were continuing to coincide." The book reproduces photographs that (for the most part) correlate with the surrounding text -- very artful pictures to my admittedly untrained eye (the exception being the photo that showed way more of the male anatomy than I cared to see). I particularly liked Self's (presumably) fictional friend Sherman Oaks, a three foot tall artist who creates larger than life-size sculptures of his own body. All of this was quite funny and I would have been happy if the novel had ended there. Unfortunately, it didn't.

In the novel's second section, Self is psychotic. Self tells his therapist that he wants to write a book about "who killed film -- for film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age." His investigative methodology involves walking from LAX to Hollywood. Self often sees himself as playing a part in a movie -- in fact, through most of the book, he thinks he is a character being played by Pete Postlethwaite or (more to his liking) David Thewlis. Others seem to think so too. When Self visits his artistic friends, they are also being played by actors (Bret Easton Ellis is played by "mid-period Orson Welles"). Self decides that the walk should be filmed so a small crew accompanies him on his journey (or so he believes). A crew member, hearing that this was to be "a subversive take on Hollywood consisting of a continuous take of him walking around Los Angeles for a week," observes that "it wouldn't add up to anything." I can't summarize my reaction to the book any more succinctly than that.

Self uses the bulk of part two to make fun of Los Angeles (Hollywood in particular). Hollywood is such an easy and frequent target that it hardly seems worthy of Self's talent. In addition to all things Hollywood, Self's satire attaches itself to multiple, seemingly random targets, including Google employees, art, advertising, architecture, e-commerce, writers, and mobile phone users. There were times when I lost the story, or the story lost me ... times when I had to ask questions like "How did Scooby Doo and Daniel Craig enter into the story and why is everybody fighting?" While some of this is fun, Self tries too hard to be fashionable and witty; in those (too frequent) moments the novel becomes tedious, particularly when Self drops the names of the various actors, directors, and writers he knows, none of whom make an interesting contribution to the story. At other times the novel reads like the description of an acid-induced fantasy; some of those passages are funny, others are too strange or too nonsensical to register on my humor meter. From time to time Self seemed to be writing in-jokes for a crowd I have not been invited to join.

Part two ends after Self completes his trip to Hollywood. I was hoping part three would redeem the novel (at least partially) by restoring the magic of part one. Sadly, part three was only marginally better than part two. Self recognizes and even mocks his self-indulgence when he writes that he "remained sunk deep in my own solipsism" during his stroll through Hollywood. Failing to learn from this insight, Self's "morbid self-absorption" underlies part three just as deeply as it did part two (I didn't need to know, for instance, that espresso makes his bowels liquefy). This time he decides to take a forty mile hike on the Holderness coast. The trip is hampered by Self's frequent inability to remember who he is -- his disorder du jour is Alzheimer's. His descriptions of the local characters he encounters and his rendering of their accents provides an occasional chuckle but fails to rise to the comedic level established in part one. I struggled to finish and was grateful for the photographs that broke up the text and helped speed the way to the end.

NOT RECOMMENDED