FICTION

THE QUANTITY THEORY OF MADNESS by Will Self (Grove/Atlantic: $21; 224 pp.) Appropriately, Will Self lives in his own world, humdrum on the surface, but within, warped and torqued and funny as false teeth. Already compared in Britain to Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Julian Barnes, Self has fashioned himself a unique niche in America, with “My Idea of Fun” and, especially, “Cock & Bull,” the vibrant vicissitudes of a woman who awakes to find addends to her pudends and a man similarly stricken. Surprised and delighted by Self’s reception in the Colonies, his publishers have lost no time in publishing here his first collection, the seed from which his beanstalk sprouted. And a magic seed it is, a straight-faced sendup of psychology, anthropology, doxology and any other innocent ology that happens into the path of this bent, bright bulldozer. Take the “theory” of the title piece. It having been established (in a previous story) that the experimental exchanging of the roles of mental patients and their doctors works only too well, a psychiatrist stumbles upon a larger truth, startling in its simplicity: In every grouping is a certain percentage of the insane. Ergo, if an advantaged group can induce madness in a disproportionate number of members of an adjacent group, the first group will be gloriously normal. In Selfworld, this makes perfect sense, even when discussed deadpan by a doctor who tracks down a missing mentor by “deciphering” the graffiti on men’s-room walls. (The mentor is following his analysand by preceding him.) Meanwhile, an earnest anthropologist studies a tribe in the Amazon basin whose greatest joy is in boring one another, and whose response to encroaching, defoliating civilization is “Big deal.” And a son meets his mother in a London suburb a year after she died, raising some question over the nature of Paradise. . . . Once hooked, it’s hard to conceive of a Selfless world.