=Book recently read: How the Dead Live by Will Self=

The first 150 pages of this book—describing a woman’s death from cancer—were almost unreadable; they were as harrowing as anything I've ever read. The second 256 pages—describing Lily Bloom’s experience in the afterlife—were almost unreadable for the opposite reason, being so facetious and packed with the author’s exhausting cleverness. At first, I welcomed the change in emotional gears, but as the novel dragged on (and on) the gag, never all that original to begin with (the afterlife is a lot like this life; in fact, the dead often exist side by side with the living without the latter even noticing), wore thinner than an uncle’s three-strand comb-over. Will Self is without a doubt a real maestro with the language, but this book could have been shorter by half and it’s point would have been twice as sharp.