*Starred Review* This impressive second book in Self's already acclaimed trilogy (following Umbrella, 2012) continues readers' tumultuous journey through the human psyche. Opening with recurring character Zack Busner, the book begins in 1970 in a commune he cofounded to integrate psychiatric patients into society. From there, it winds its way almost seamlessly, without paragraphs or chapter breaks, through the viewpoints of many characters, switching between time and place frequently and without warning. The plot traces circles through the streets of England in WWII, the haunts of junkies in the 1980s, and beyond, returning at times to the commune, where the patients and doctors are tripping on LSD while severely ill resident Claude Evenrude and visitor Michael De'Ath recall their military experiences during the bombing of Hiroshima. As the stories of these and other characters are relayed in spasmodic fits and starts, readers are propelled at a dizzying pace through a tangle of events and contemporary references. This jumbled structure is the platform from which Self explores society's judgments of and effects on sanity and mental health. Self's style pays homage to the modernism of writers such as Joyce and Céline and the black humor of Vonnegut and Heller in this challenging but exceptional read.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2014 Booklist

A hallucinatory, maddening, difficult novel by the shape-shifting Self (Umbrella, 2013, etc.), who dons his best Pynchon-esque finery.It's not a screaming that comes across the sky, not exactly, but instead a chunking guitar that herald's Self's opening: "owowwow-owww! the clawed chord howls in the hallway and tears up the stairs." It's the tail end of the 1960s, the day four kids are being shot down in Ohio, and over in tony London, a psychiatrist, for reasons that are not entirely clear, decides to test the therapeutic possibilities of lysergic acid on his own bad self. Time slips away, and so do the niceties of syntax, until some hundreds of pages later he begins to latch hold of his trip: "Lost in the curdled depths of the Labrador's mild-brown eyes, Zack isn't shocked by this hallucination, instead rather admires the dog's American accent." But more is afoot than just a lava-lamp swirl: During the proceedings, truths are unfolding about the century past in the jagged confessions of two haunted residents, one a survivor of the shark-doomed Indianapolis, which before sinking had carried the atomic bomb across the Pacific to the waiting Enola Gay, the other a witness to the obliteration of Hiroshima. The clash of "disabled ex-servicemen" and "bloody hippies" is obvious, as is the presence, perhaps real and perhaps imagined, of a malevolent German ("[v]ery gutt patientz, the Kraut soothes, ve-ery nize patientz"), but the whole enterprise collapses in a meltdown of ellipses and em dashes until we're not quite sure where we are in the proceedings. Self's presentation is too clever by half, and though undeniably artful, it's a chore for readers: The book seems destined for cult status, to be sure, but it's hard to imagine even the most die-hard of Gravity's Rainbow fans warming up to this one. Puzzling and ponderous but never predictablevery much in line with Self's trajectory thus far, in other words. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

After declaring the novel dead in May in his Guardian article "The Novel Is Dead (This Time It's For Real)," Self returns with a new novel, and it is a maddening, uncompromising, serious, self-indulgent, and beautiful work. The second book in a planned trilogy, following Umbrella (which was shortlisted for the Man Booker), the novel reacquaints us with the unconventional psychiatrist Zack Busner. Busner is the proprietor of the Concept House, a mental health residence in which residents are given free rein. In an unbroken wall of text (no chapters or paragraph breaks), Self describes the many characters of the Concept House, including Lt. Claude Evenrude, who is scarred by what he did over Hiroshima as the target spotter for the Enola Gay, and Michael Lincoln, who watched men die as he floated in the shark-filled Pacific waters after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Their narratives, along with others, converge in a labyrinth of pyschedelic high modern voices ("Michael can see the drinkers' beery guffaws... plain as iron filings round a vulcanite rod"), which, while ceaselessly musical and electric, often feels claustrophobic and disorienting. Bound to exasperate as often as it thrills, Self's novel is a worthy follow-up, and comes as close to capturing the frightening bad trip of modern life as any book in recent memory. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

JUST BEFORE THE climax of Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster "Jaws," the shark hunter Quint tells a harrowing story about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the Navy ship that was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine days after delivering materials for the first atomic bomb. Quint's tale of sailors drowned and devoured by sharks is so ghoulish and riveting it's easy to miss a detail he shared before telling it: He's had his Indianapolis tattoo removed. Bad idea. To paraphrase the old saw, those who try to forget the past are doomed to be gnawed to death by it off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. Willfully neglected history, man-made catastrophe, hubris - and, yes, "Jaws" - all circulate through Will Self's latest novel, "Shark," which is determined to stoke our collective memories of humanity at its worst. To tell that story, Self stokes another memory as well, exhuming the form of old-fashioned modernism. Opening midsentence, the novel takes place largely over the course of one day, starting with a man bearing a shaving razor, his head brimming with thoughts, and careens to a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness close. In between, Self covers four decades' worth of violence and degradation, from Hiroshima to heroin, torpedoes to great whites. "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," James Joyce wrote in "Ulysses." "Shark," a kind of "Ulysses" manqué, is an insistent, busy, comic, woozy, frightening, exasperating, never-boring assertion that the nightmare hasn't ended. Self started down this particular path with his 2012 novel, "Umbrella," a Booker finalist largely concerned with the 100 -year aftermath of the First World War. At its center were Zack Busner, a London psychiatrist who's appeared in other Self works, and Audrey Death (or De'Ath), the sister of a British machine-gunner, whose mind was freed from its encephalitic cage thanks to a drug experiment. Memories of war and loss gushed out of "Umbrella" like a backed-up storm drain: carnage, shell shock, the physical and mental damage that came from Audrey's assembling shells and from soldiers' firing them. Self's prose in "Umbrella" was busy and slippery, shifting point of view and setting within the space of an emdash or ellipsis. It could soar to a 30,000-foot Olympian view, then zoom deep into the knotted minds of mental patients. Echoes of Woolf abounded, though reading "Umbrella" you suspected Self wished "Mrs. Dalloway" dwelled more on its doomed veteran, Septimus Smith. Paragraph breaks were rare in "Umbrella"; Self's sole orthographic tweak for "Shark," the second book in a planned trilogy, is to dispense with them entirely. (One fears what will happen to punctuation in the final book.) But the major themes in the new novel remain the same: combat, grief and the power of an illicit dose of medicine to unlock our suppressed anxieties. The story's center is again Busner: On May 4, 1970 (the day of the Kent State shootings, and a year before his experiments with Audrey), he's running the Concept House, an unorthodox mental-health commune in a London suburb. The place has "no rules and only the queerest of conventions," the key one being that its residents aren't given drugs - or, rather, aren't supposed to receive them. The inmates-running-the-asylum environment is most potently represented by Claude Evenrude, a logorrheic Navy vet who was aboard the Indianapolis. For Claude - and to an extent for Self - the ship's destruction was the moment when a sense of order proved to be a myth: "Safety in numbers is one of the many delusions, like truth, justice and the chain of command, that have been torn apart and scattered on the waters." After the Concept House residents are dosed with LSD, the center has an even harder time holding. It's a bad trip for Busner, who doesn't realize what's happened until too late, as one colleague's face morphs into "a van Gogh morass of pus and pore." For Claude and his fellow commune-mates, though, the drugging provides if not sanity and clarity, at least a prompt to discuss the atrocities they've witnessed. Among them is Michael, a scion of the De'Ath family and British soldier who observed the bombing of Hiroshima aboard the Enola Gay. He claims he could observe the decimated bodies after the explosion, a vision that Self describes in a phrase at once graceful and repellent: "flung confetti at the wedding of nightmare to reason." "Shark" shuttles back in time to Peter De'Ath, a conscientious objector during World War II and member of an ill-fated commune; forward to the '80s as Genie, the daughter of Peter's hard-drinking lover, succumbs to a shattering drug addiction; back again to 1975, as Zack takes in a screening of "Jaws" that prompts a flashback to his acid trip; and forward again to near the present day, to Genie's tentative recovery. Throughout, Self assembles a host of materials from the cultural junk drawer: quotes, puns, coinages ("fitszackerly," "brainstarver," "schlockenspiel"), references to the Beatles, Queen and Victorian poetry. "Shark" often embodies an observation Zack makes about Claude: It is a "choppy wordsea, its surface crisscrossed by narrative currents swirling into whirlpools of song that subside into glassily superficial doldrums of what might be anecdotage, but beneath which, Busner is convinced, fluxes and refluxes of dangerous repression coldly circulate." Which is to say that "Shark" often reads like a baggy mess. Yet it's a mess that reflects a respectable urge to capture the mental and social collapse Self sees as a legacy of the world wars. In the face of millions of corpses and persistent madness, narrative tidiness simply won't do. Tidal waves of words match the moral disillusionment that strikes practically every character. Peter's faith is shaken: "His God had never been a meek, mild, silky-bearded ephebe, but a clean-shaven Old Testament bully, who took every trick his partner won for his own." And Genie despairs of her appetites: "This terrible, remorseless creature was still inside her, one that, no matter what she threw into its vicious jaws ... booze, gear, pills, fags ... would remain ravenous." Self wants to grab our heads firmly, turn us toward the mushroom cloud, make us look at the bodies Claude claimed to see within it, and never flatter ourselves that our capacity for self-destruction is distant history or somebody else's problem. Self isn't especially interested in arguments that World War II was just - Peter bats those away quickly at his conscientious objector status hearing. Self's concern is with damage, not the cold logic that produced it. Which, in a sense, makes "Shark" one of his most compassionate, earnest books despite its grotesque visions and rhetorical somersaulting. Self began his career in the early '90s as an inheritor of the Angry Young Men, satirizing gender, capitalism and British society. But "Shark" arrives at an accommodating, relatively optimistic conclusion, that we have the potential for recovery amid the madness, even if identifying the process is an awful business of trial and error that can take decades. For all the corpses and brokenness in the novel, there's depth of feeling too: for Busner and his well-intentioned yet ill-conceived Concept House, for Claude and Michael for the destruction they witnessed, for Peter for his protest. And, lastly, Genie, for her very survival. Spotting a "Jaws" poster on the street, she sees clear her condition - and everyone's. "That's me, she thought, I'm a minnowy thing swimmin' along on the surface kicking me tootsies, but down below there's this ... big monster that's gonna bite me in half." In the face of mass death and madness, Self suggests, narrative tidiness won't do. MARK ATHITAKIS has written for The Virginia Quarterly Review, Pacific Standard and Barnes & Noble Review, among other publications.

Self's verbose, sometimes opaque narrative fiction (e.g., Great Apes; Umbrella) often leaves the uninitiated reader dazed, and this latest work is no exception. Through shards of paragraphs, staccato-styled sentences, and multiple characters, Self examines the enduring psychological scars of war and humanity's collective fascination with violence. The novel centers on an acid trip undertaken by Dr. Zack Busner, a psychiatrist working in an experimental community whom readers first met in the Man Booker short-listed Umbrella. Unbeknownst to Busner, two of his patients witnessed the destruction of war from two distinct vantage points, one aboard the Enola Gay and the other barely afloat in shark-infested waters after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Reflecting on the LSD trip during a viewing of Jaws, Busner muses on the psychopathology of violence from the perspective of both aggressor and victim. VERDICT Not unlike the rest of his work, Self's new novel is a sprawling puzzle of fiction that will repel the average reader while rewarding fans of the experimental form. Though not necessary, reading Umbrella first will allow readers to traverse the narrative bridge between the novels. [See Prepub Alert, 6/2/14.]-Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.