Liver

Will Self’s pitch-black humor and purplish prose circulate freely through his latest, Liver, a collection of stories loosely conjoined by troubles associated with the human body’s busiest internal organ. For 16 years, since the publication of his novel My Idea of Fun, this bad-boy Brit has been melding the scatological and the grotesque, but this is only the surface—his work also possesses a surprisingly moral core. Liver features plenty of grotesque scenarios: Among its more whimsical turns are a 2,646-year-old human-organ-pilfering Martian, a gigantic liver-eating vulture and a story narrated by an omniscient virus. Yet the book’s fantastical touches can’t outdo its harder-hitting realist and ethical aspects. Here, the liver is meant to be a last stand against the noise and impurities of contemporary life, which are making us sick.

In Self’s version of reality, the modern metropolis and its “cultural toxins” are slowly destroying people both spiritually and physically: In the first and funniest entry, “Foie Humaine,” profanity-spewing (and liver-compromised) alcoholic gangster Val Carmichael attempts to pass along his legacy to junior members of his notorious crew. In “Prometheus,” amoral admen Prometheus and Epimetheus are the new gods of urban myth, dreaming of one day selling advertising directly to the consumer. Most notable, however, is the story “Introitus,” where a soul-dead woman and her cancerous liver travel to antiseptic Zurich seeking assisted suicide—a death wish that’s temporarily diverted by an act of dubious divine mercy. Like his Brit-lit contemporary Ian McEwan, Self finds sadistic pleasure in predestining his flimsy characters to suffer in an aesthetically and morally corrupt society. The impact of his mean-spirited wit can be likened to a flamethrower incinerating a sheet of paper dolls. But Self’s best work has always relied on high-wire verbal acrobatics and cruel-minded social satire: and it’s these abundant qualities that save Liver from becoming just another McEwan-style bilefest.—Michael Sandlin

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