Orwell once joked that most writers write purely in order to get revenge on their parents and those who doubt it, myself among them, will find much to cause them to think again in this brave, but often strange and disquieting, memoir. Jonathan Self's childhood makes pretty grim reading, although the story is told with eerie politeness. ("I don't think it would be an overstatement of the facts to say that I was enormously apprehensive during this period of my life.") Raised by parents of almost Dickensian inadequacy, he was scorned at home and sexually molested at school, beaten by his mother and deserted by his father, before plunging as a teenager into a series of spectacularly unsuccessful relationships with women several decades his senior.
There followed addictions to cocaine and alcohol, failed marriages, nervous exhaustion, a series of business disasters and what the blurb describes as "the struggle to break the repeating patterns of the past and the torment of not succeeding."
One can't help but wonder whether publishing this book will help the author's recovery. Yes, we live in the age of confession, and the Oprahfication of the world seems almost complete. We are all survivors now, or at least consumers of other people's survival. But it is a dangerous place on the moral grid, that precise point where the book trade's need for profit intersects with the desire of wounded individuals to publicly come to terms with their private pain.
Jonathan Self is the brother of the infamous and awesomely talented novelist Will, and from time to time his precocious sibling peeps into the restrained and careful narrative like a mischievous imp at a vicar's bridge evening. Here he is, snogging Beryl Bainbridge at an office party. And there he goes, lecturing his besotted Oxford classmates on how tedious and stupid and unworthy they are. He sounds like the most loveable brother a person could have and the book blazes into life whenever he appears.
To be fair, it must be noted that Jonathan's writing acquits itself decently enough by comparison with that of his brother, at least some of the time. Where Will's voice is occasionally a bit self-conscious in its longing to dazzle, Jonathan's is efficient, workmanlike, not at all given to straining for effects.
He has a nice line in wry jokes, too. Describing his first girlfriend, he tells us she was "a tall, striking girl [who had] started out working in the Playboy Club where she went by the name of Bunny Coral until she scratched off the letter 'C' for a joke and was fired by the Bunny Mother."
But his seductively chatty tone is too often damaged by a weakness for ciche. This is a book where people have "pangs of regret", where "an enquiring mind, a keen intellect and a wicked sense of humour" guarantee you entry to "a glamorous jet-set". "Denial permeated ever nook and cranny of my being," he confides, which sounds exceptionally painful if literally true.
It doesn't help, either, that a pinch of Mills and Boon has been stirred into the mix: "My heart leapt. I took her in my arms and pulled her towards me, but her body remained rigid." With prose like that, whose wouldn't?
As for the details of his relationship with his notorious sibling, a subject which might be of interest to potential buyers of this book whoever those might be, cliche is used, perhaps deliberately, to obscure what must surely be a more fascinating story than the one we get. "There was always a degree of antagonism between us. Yet simultaneously there was an exceptionally strong fraternal bond." Fine.
But you could use the same set of meaningless phrases about almost any set of brothers, from Cane and Abel to Jim and Gay Mitchell, and still say nothing real about any of them.
The book purports to be a meditation on "love, loss and fatherhood" and, at its best, it does have interesting things to say about the bittersweet realities of family life. His larruping wagon of a mother is described with a detachment that could look like hatred but is actually all the more powerful for its sang-froid. His useless blithering gom of a father reads like a living argument for compulsory vasectomy, preferably performed with a rusty spoon.
There miserable business of the being the child of an imploding marriage is recounted without a shred of self-pity and, sometimes, with a odd brand of mordant comedy. Nor did such miseries stop when the author became an adult. There is a brief, but haunting, account of his wedding celebration, for example, at the climax of which his mother bawls at the hapless photographer, "If you think I am having my photograph taken with that fucking bastard [her husband], think again."
But the book's insights into parenthood are, to put it kindly, a bit second-hand. Of course almost every new father finds the birth of this child moving, and clearly Mr Self did too.
He is obviously the caring father that his own father so pitifully failed to be, and if I were his baby I would consider myself lucky to gaze out from my cot at such a reconstructed, if painfully self-critical, dad.
But do we really have to read any more breathy accounts of former blokes weeping in delivery rooms with new babies in their arms? Yes, we all do it, or most of us anyway, and there's nothing wrong with a good hard blub at such moments; it's just that at this stage it's difficult to write about them without seeming to be paraphrasing somebody else.
The book has several structural flaws and would have benefited from the attentions of a more ruthless editor. Far too much time is taken up in describing the lives of the author's grandparents, for example.
If there is one thing worse than people going on about their holidays, it is surely people going on about their grandparents, characters who almost always become fictional in the narrowest sense, both in books and in conversation.
Only a stoneheart would not sympathise with Jonathan Self. His parents and several other vicious adults inflicted a grotesquely miserable childhood n him and his attempts to overcome it are nothing less than inspiring. He is a talented writer whose prose resounds with a kind of old-fashioned decency which he obviously had to learn for himself. Perhaps this book will help him. Perhaps it will help others who have grown up in similarly dismal circumstances.
But in the end the pain is only glimpsed through a glass darkly, and his descriptions of that terrible childhood are so mannerly and therefore so lifeless, that one can't help doubting the book's therapeutic power. But that is nearly always the problem with memoirs. I think he should write a novel and really let rip.
Joseph O'Connor's novel Inishowen is published by Vintage paperbacks. Yeats is Dead!, the comic serial which he edited, has just been published by Jonathan Cape.