Are We Having Fun Yet? : MY IDEA OF FUN, <i> By Will Self (Grove/Atlantic: $21; 309 pp.)</i>

“My Idea of Fun” opens with a woman at a dinner party asking the protagonist “So what is your idea of fun, Ian?” His wife, sitting across the table, overhears the question and offers, “Oh, I don’t think Ian has much of an idea of fun at the moment, the poor old sod’s too bound up in his work.” Don’t bet on that, luv: The next thought that crackles through the neon-lit cesspool of Ian’s brain is a vivid daydream in which he rips the head off an old man in a subway (tube) and--let’s choose our words carefully here--applies himself to the hole in the corpse’s neck. It’s “a bit like a mackerel,” he tells us as he would attempt to tell his wife if he could render the unthinkable to her as easily as he does to us. “That’s why I needed to hoist myself right up on top. I needed all my weight to penetrate the still seeping stem. . . .” This is probably not a good place to mention this, but I’m unable to find a better one: Will Self has dedicated “My Idea of Fun” to his 3-year-old daughter.

Will Self is currently being referred to as the hottest young novelist in England, and this is probably true. That is, it’s true as I write this; it may not be true by the time you read it. The shelf life of Brit lit stars these days is about the same as that of pop music stars; for instance, Self, with two novellas and one collection of stories, is already considered by many English critics to be the successor to Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, and if you’re like me, you hadn’t known that those two had been around long enough to need successors.

In any event, the tag is both misleading and unfair to Self. Self’s pop-star image in the U.K. is (or ought to be) of no importance to us here. Self is more talented and more original than either Amis or McEwan, and more established British novelists such as Salman Rushdie are just muddying the critical waters by writing things like “Will Self is already a cult figure”--as if that were a reason why anyone who reads should want to buy one of his books. The truth is that in his collection of stories (“The Quantity Theory of Insanity”) and twin novellas (“Cock & Bull”) Self has already caused more of an electric ripple among readers than any British writer of his half-generation. I’ve never read an interview with Self, so I don’t know how well he sells himself; I do know his books get people to talking.

“My Idea of Fun” may well test the amount of Self love his readers can take. Those who are shocked before finishing the first chapter will have skipped over a first page quote from Issac Bashevis Singer without absorbing it: “I have told myself a thousand times not to be shocked, but every time I am shocked again by what people will do to have fun, for reasons they cannot explain.” Self tries to explain what people will do to have fun, or more precisely what they will imagine for fun, and however much pleasure each of us draws from our own sadistic imaginations our thoughts don’t sound particularly nice when related to others. Self’s protagonist, Ian, calls us his “gentle” readers and then adds, “I say ‘gentle’ but what I really mean is pusillanimous reader, guarded reader, reader walled off against darker suasion.” Of course, he needs us: We’re the only ones he can unburden himself in front of.

Ian’s neuroses begin to coalesce with the appearance of a Mr. Broadhurst, an enormous fat man who lived at a trailer park run by Ian’s mother (Broadhurst could properly be called Dickensian if Dickens was obsessed with sadomasochistic fantasies). Broadhurst, whom young Ian comes to refer to as “The Fat Controller” (the name of a character in the “Thomas the Tank Engine” children’s book series),becomes the boy’s mentor. Soon, his image begins to permeate virtually all aspects of Ian’s life: in a Woody Allen-ish touch, the Fat Controller pops up in Ian’s copy of DeQuincey’s “Confessions of an Opiun Eater” and in a letter Sir Issac Newton writes to Sir John Locke (as he begins to dill up Ian’s present, he also begins to crowd in to the past). Broadhurst, it develops, is an eidetic, or someone with an unusually strong visual memory; he spots a fellow eidetic and potential acolyte in Ian.

Given Ian’s ability to summon up terrifyingly real images of horror (Self is a former cartoonist), it’s difficult to tell how much of the plot is to be taken as “real” and how much is conjured up in Ian’s Fat Controller-influenced head. When a woman upbraids Broadhurst in a restaurant for boorish behavior, Ian sees him track her down and dispatch her with the tip of a poisoned umbrella (an image no more absurd than at least one leading Kennedy assassination theory). Ian thinks he may have imagined this, but an item in the paper on the woman’s death is quite real (I think he’s kidding himself; newspaper items are as easy to imagine as poisoned umbrellas). Does Broadhurst murder a college student with whom Ian is about to have his first sexual experience or is it Ian creating a monstrous figment of his imagination to put the blame on?

Ian attempts to find the answer through psychiatry. A Dr. Gyggle takes him into deep-sleep therapy where Self, moving into high gear, plunges us into the Land of Children’s Jokes, in which the characters (including a quadruple floating amputee) seem to have been given shape by Jim Henson. Anyone who has been reading up to this point will have no trouble guessing who Dr. Gyggle is in league with.

References to WWwwilliam Burroughs in interviews with Self aren’t plucked out of the air: Like America’s leading phantasmagoricalist, the overriding theme of “My Idea of Fun” is Control--how it’s achieved, how it’s maintained, its psychological underpinnings. It seems logical that Ian would finally fall into the Fat controller’s foot steps as a genius marketing consultant, one of a race of men adept at methods of control that would have Orwell licking his chops. But stories about control are as difficult to control as a unicycle on a ski slope. One either takes Self’s meticulously constructed images of violence and mutilation seriously or one doesn’t; if you don’t, your eyes start to glaze, and if you do you get your fill before the novel starts to slide out of control around the final third.

It’s not that Self has set out to write a novel full of gratuitous gore; writers of horror and pornography novels look for quick, generic images that aren’t written in sentences that call attention to their own polish. Self is attempting something very ambitious in “My Idea of Fun,” but he doesn’t have the depth to pull it off and when he tries to cover that fact he does it in typically modern British novelist style with a nasty quip or smarmy joke. Good ones, too, but they don’t hide the fact that a novelist with less interest in shining early would have put the early version of the book aside till he’d acquired the skill to handle the idea.