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The Butt
  
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The Butt (Paperback)


2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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2.0 out of 5 stars We throw butts away, Nov 22 2008
This review is from: The Butt (Hardcover)
Think of the phrase, where there's smoke there's fire and recall that the first smoke of the book is extinguished and tossed from a balcony. That's a warning.

I'm a real fan of Will Self but this book is downright uncharacteristic of what I expect from Self in terms of imaginative writing. Similar is the way Homes' The End of Alice (a brilliant read) then became a dull plodding regular, average work in This Book Will Save Your Life. It's as though something happens, the effort spent in writing the really good book is lost and the next one is a writer's holiday or something.

In a way his style here is closest to what he used for Tough Tough Toys. The main character tosses his butt, it burns onto the head of a man below, and our protagonist, if we want to call him that because our identification with him is shallow, is dragged through a tale he has little control over. Things get worse, of course, as though he were the Vicar of Wakefield and the sole purpose of plot is to make things worse. Yeah, it's outdated except in Hollywood. So he gets stuck on a vacation island due to little known laws send fingers across lands, so if he were to merely leave the island people have a right to destroy his belongings up to the two million dollar bond. It sounds a bit like Mark Leyner's "New Jersey State Discretionary Execution Program." I found myself wondering if Self is making fun of peoples of color generally, or whether he understands the implications of his words as he discusses those who inhabit the island since there are a few very stereotypical cliches at use -- he could follow them up to make a point about capitalist society and visible minorities or first versus third world peoples but he doesn't.

Most shocking is the way the book offers so little. Self has admitted he's weak on plot and here it shows more than ever. You really need to force yourself to stick with this one, but afterwords you wonder why you kept at it. Maybe this is the joke, we're held prisoner too, in a little island called a book. You title a book Butt and you seem to ask for a whole lot of jokes at your expense (you get my drift). This one deserves a kicking or to be tossed into the ashtray, the way we treat most butts.
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