All cock and browned off

Anyone who's read Palahniuk's Guts will recognise that feeling. It starts as an itchy twitch in the tummy, then a desire to squirm in one's seat. The mouth either gets pulled back towards the ears or into a moue of distaste. Buttocks clench and this passes down to the legs which fidget in all directions, as the eyes are drawn inexorably to the next paragraph on. Being grossed out, bodily: from head to dirty-feeling toes.

In this combination of two novellas, Self expands on the idea of gradual or sudden genital acquisition. Cock concerns itself with a woman who slowly grows a penis; a vagina behind a man's knee is the subject of Bull. The stories are visceral and ugly, often portraying their cast at their most insensitive or sinister. Their humour is bleak and barbed, and to feel that Self might not commit to some overarching theme is to miss the fact that he is applying his energies elsewhere.

The stories resist easy Freudian analysis, or overapplication of gender mooing---courageously, considering their subject matter---although everything succumbs to a hammer if you hit it hard enough, of course. Carol's personality changes are as much a movement into the personality space her husband vacates, as a response to her new organs; John's feminization consists of blind, utilitarian actions, not castration fears. But the strength of these stories is in their portrayal of typical people (if generally more neurotic than most) handling situations ineptly and messily. The hapless victim of "John Bull" is named so as to universalize his situation. Weakly Kafkaesque in their attempt to accumulate humour---and the casting of Bull as a farce confirms this---they fare much better when not compared to any of Self's heroes.

All this, as usual, takes place entirely in spite of Self's grandiloquence and tangled verbiage. These stories succeed on their own merits, as if they had been written by someone else and poorly related by a copywriter who has never seen a sentence to know how they actually work; or, worse, never seen a bad sentence to know how they don't. The thickets and thorns he dumps around these two tales only do harm, especially the pointless narrator's scenes in Cock added apparently only for a bit of obvious symbolism, and to be able to end the story neatly. You often wonder whether Self had a reason for writing in this forced, pretentious way; or whether, ironically, he stumbled from one word to the next, with no more plan than his protagonists.