Quick Fix

Richard Hermes, the hero of English writer Will Self’s latest satire, “The Sweet Smell of Psychosis,” like many a Dick Whittington before him, comes south to London to make his fortune, fleeing “the news desk of a homely, old newspaper, in a homely, old northern city . . . [and] a girlfriend tending towards parturition.” A flatlet in Hornsey and a deputy editorship at a Time Out knock-off give him access to the room that holds the ladder of success--specifically the bar of the Sealink Club, London’s hack heaven, where the journalists of London gather to drink and destroy.

The man to give him a leg up is the reigning Buddha of Broadcasting, the omnipotent, omnipresent Bell, who boasts a daily syndicated column, a weekly television program and a late-night talk-radio show. “Given the Venn intersections implied by this saturation coverage, one of Bell’s most sycophantic acolytes had established--through certain arcane statistical computations--that there must, logically, be at least two hundred thousand people in Britain who did nothing else but listen to Bell’s voice, watch Bell’s face, or read his words, for every waking hour of their lives.” Bell requires only one ticket for entree into his inner circle--a willingness to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants it.

For Richard, selling his soul to this particular Mephistopheles is made most palatable by the presence of one of Bell’s angels, the exquisite Ursula Bentley. Despite her own magazine column, which Richard, in his more sober moments, confesses “had all the mondial impact of a used cotton bud falling on to a damp towel,” Ursula Bentley “was not simply beautiful, but beautiful in a way that was so vastly improbable--like a diamond found in a gutter behind a Chinese takeaway” and perfect without the aid of cosmetics, save “a little moisturizer, and Jicki, the subtle, irrepressibly erotic fragrance created by Guerlain for the Empress Eugenie.”

What more can the poor boy do than climb the ladder and chase after the flame? And indeed, Ursula’s flame shows more than a flicker of interest. But Richard is no super moth, and soon his downwardly mobile nights with Bell and his upwardly mobile days at the magazine lead him to breakfast, lunch and dine with “Pablo” (as Richard refers to his relationship with Bolivian Marching Powder). Slipping at his job and not yet sleeping with his goddess, Richard falls into a coke-and-bull psychosis in the urinals beneath Notting Hill Gate and “toppled forward so that the side of his face and his shoulder were pressed against the slick jaundice of the splashback.” Then and there, he makes a decision. He will give up coke; he will go back north, drink a pint of real ale with his father. He will leave London, “but before he did so he would make one last assault on Mount Ursula.”

True to his plan, he climbs higher and higher. And yet, even as he plants his flag on the summit, the ground beneath his feet shifts. “Her features were transfigured--No, not transfigured, transforming! They were changing, being replaced by other, stronger, more brutish features.” Ask not for whom the bell tolls. . . .

The sweet smell of metamorphosis that permeates much of Self’s writing, from last year’s “Great Apes” to Self’s famous twin novels of hermaphroditic transfiguration, “Cock” and “Bull,” also perfumes this story of Richard Hermes and his Aphrodite. And although Self is dining with Kafka and Gogol as much as with Pablo, the very real, stale, millennial cigarette smell of London’s Fourth Estate will infiltrate the nostrils of even the most distant reader. Anyone who has spent any time in the mosh pit of the London literary scene certainly will read “The Sweet Smell of Psychosis” as a satirical roman a clef and will have his own personal short list of clefs identifying Richard, Ursula and Bell with their real counterparts, perhaps even Self himself, whose career has been punctuated, if not defined, by excess (he was once notoriously fired by a London newspaper for snorting heroin on Prime Minister John Major’s campaign plane).

What sticks in the mind, however, is not Self’s satirical bite. Anne Billson’s hilarious 1993 “Suckers,” with its take on the vampires of the City of London, and Richard Rayner’s 1995 “Blue Suit” are both better sendups of English excess, ‘90s style. For intellectual fun, Julian Barnes is more the man, and for sheer embarrassment, for the kind of plot twists that the reader glimpses from behind barely parted fingers shrieking, “No, no, please don’t go there!,” Martin Amis is the master.

There is a good-natured Candide-camera kind of a quality to Self’s voyeurism that dulls the canines. The Martin Rowson block prints that illustrate “The Sweet Smell” have a kind of balloon-like cuteness to them that makes their humor soft and approachable when compared with the excess of William Hogarth or the angularity and self-loathing of Ralph Steadman with Hunter S. Thompson by his side. Richard Hermes is right there, licking the mirror, next to William, Ralph and Hunter S.

What finally strikes a reader is that Self, like Amis pere et fils, is one of those four-letter authors who revel in the Word, the euphemistic trope, the rococo corners of the English language, 10-quid words like “maculate” and “panjandrum.” This sheer love of language, the belief that the high of literature is to be found by snorting words off a Webster’s, sets Self up at the bar with great linguistic junkies like T.C. Boyle. At 96 pages, “The Sweet Smell of Psychosis” may be only a quick fix. But language is still legal.