Adult sons writing about their dead mother’s extramarital affairs is having something of a moment in 2024, niche as the subject matter may seem. No sooner have we climbed into bed with David Baddiel’s revealing childhood memoir, My Family, than along comes Elaine, Will Self’s semi-fictitious examination of his mum’s wandering eye and rapidly fracturing psyche in 1950s America.

Finding herself enveloped by the claustrophobic, sexually permissive world of Ivy League academics via her marriage to a taciturn professor, Elaine soon feels her vivid inner life chafing against the banal restrictions of middle-class respectability. With her creative ambitions stifled by the demands of motherhood and her intellect ground down by a numbing, never-ending cycle of household chores, Elaine seeks relief through what she believes to be the only form of rebellion left available to her: infidelity.

A wordy, introspective and admirably intense novel, Elaine sees Self weave fragments of his mother’s own, authentic diary entries into his stream-of-conscience narrative. The effect is palpably honest, sometimes frighteningly so, as he seeks to excavate the truth of the woman out from beneath the lies of the wife and the facade of the mother.