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| Product DescriptionWill Self has one of literature's most astonishing imaginations, and in How the Dead Live his talent has come to full flower. Lily Bloom is an angry, aging American transplanted to England, now losing her battle with cancer. Attended by nurses and her two daughters -- lumpy Charlotte, a dour, successful businesswoman, and beautiful Natasha, a junkie -- Lily takes us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. From '40s career girl to '50s tippling adulteress to '70s PR flak, Lily has seen America and England through most of a century of riotous and unreal change. And then it's over. Lily catches a cab with her death guide, Aboriginal wizard Phar Lap Jones, and enters the shockingly banal world of the dead: the suburbs. She discovers smoking without consequences and gets another PR job, where none of her coworkers notices that she's not alive. She gets to know her roommates: Rude Boy, her terminally furious son who died in a car accident at age nine; Lithy, a fetus that died before she ever knew it existed; the Fats, huge formless shapes composed of all the weight she's ever gained or lost. How the Dead Live is Will Self's most remarkable and expansively human book, an important, disturbing vision of our time.
Amazon.com ReviewIn April 1988, 65-year-old Lily Bloom quickly succumbs to cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital. ("Where do they keep the Royal Ear, I wonder? I think of it as very large--as big as a dinner tray--and very red, angrily red.") But after life there's death. Guided by an aborigine named Phar Lap Jones, she is transported by a Greek Cypriot minicab driver to the North London dead neighborhood of Dulston. There, accompanied by her dead son, Rude Boy, she's introduced to the 12-step Personally Dead meetings, and she watches over her living daughters--the cold, ambitious Charlotte, and her favorite, the heroin-addicted Natasha. "Natasha is peculiarly charged by the drug--and even by the mere anticipation of its effects. She shifts from being vulnerable and skittish and withdrawn to being strong and steady and extrovert. She's told me before that it makes her feel 'complete' and 'confident,' and I can see what she means. When she's off heroin she's a fucking nightmare--when she's on it she's a peach." Since Will Self's face, voice, and, notoriously, life story are familiar to many who will never pick up his fiction, there's always the risk of reading How the Dead Live as autobiography. In which case, he's clearly based Lily on his New York-born Jewish mother, and he's wittily retooled large chunks of his own much-publicized addictions, transmuting himself into the beautiful and glamorously doomed Natasha. But Lily is feisty and articulate, with a complex history spanning two continents, two husbands, and a constantly re-created personality--a great literary creation. Self's sympathetic account of Lily's decline into her morphine-laden deathbed is deeply affecting, and his long-term obsession with London provides us with the utterly convincing Dulston. His treatment of modern Jewish life in North London (rather than New York) will find its fans and critics, but the novel grows beyond such local concerns. Ultimately, it is about the vexed relationship between the worries of contemporary Western life and a more transcendent spirituality--signaled by Self's opening gesture to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and by the all-seeing Phar Lap Jones. How the Dead Live is a big book with big ideas, and quite definitely Will Self's most ambitious and mature work to date. --Alan Stewart
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