A dystopian farce featuring rampant English fascists burning piles of e-readers, as well as a 'semi-sentient' organic AI octopus called Margaret ... Told in Self’s customary brand of companionable misanthropy where even the most innocuous sentence has the petulant timbre of a diatribe. His prose, with its languid digressions punctuated by intermittent bursts of wit, achieves the rare feat of being lively and sluggish at the same time ... There’s a lot going on here but in the midst of it all we can make out Self, 64, reckoning with his own quintessence as he enters his dotage.
A coruscating satire about a group of metropolitan sophisticates trapped in an endless round of backbiting, gossip, infidelity and self-loathing ... At the heart of The Quantity Theory of Morality is a lamentation about our collective ethical compass gone askew.
The Quantity Theory of Morality contains multitudes, including multiple iterations of itself ... With each new iteration comes a ratcheting up of tension and an underhum of violence that is unmistakably Ballardian ... Raucously political ... Self reads like early Nabokov: barbed, provocative, virtuosic in his performance of linguistic jokes ... We can only hope that this rollicking, unsettling and furiously intelligent work is not meant as a valediction, though it is proof enough of Self’s Nabokovian certainty that art is the thing.
This new novel stretches this critic’s adjectives. It is deliriously poignant. It is heartbreakingly antic. It is sincere and wry at the same time ... My copy has so many turned down pages it is practically uncloseable ... The perpetual reiterations give the book a claustrophobia ... Nevertheless, it must be Self’s funniest book for some time, and it conforms to my theory that a joke only gets funnier the more you press it.
Self elegantly skewers class structure, social mores, and institutional inequality while calling out hypocrisy and pretensions through the lens of this often cringe-inducing coterie of insincere, backstabbing friends. This blend of high comedy and moral bleakness is made richer by Self’s erudite allusions and conceptual play.
Devilish ... Self’s caustic style is on full display ... The novel retreads much of Self’s catalog but that’s hardly a bad thing when exhaustion and regurgitation are the point.
His eye for human foibles and their consequences are sharp, especially when he turns his focus on antisemitism, stoked in part by a particularly rapacious AI ... A deliberately messy but potent feat of provocation.
