There’s a country pop song – best known in the version recorded by Glen Campbell in the late 1960s – that purports to represent, as the title has it, the ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife’. Part of what makes the song so tacky is the overfamiliarity of the milieu and the brand of melancholy it summons up: ‘She thinks of the young man that she almost married/What would he think if he saw her this way?’ Perhaps we’re just too well versed in the frustrations of postwar American family life. Douglas Sirk films, Richard Yates novels and pop-cultural flotsam like Campbell’s hit have taken the griefs of many and converted them into just another slice of Americana. 

The title character of Will Self’s Elaine is hardly Mrs Average – she’s a former student of the poet Theodore Roethke and her husband, John, is an English professor at Cornell – but her homemaking duties and escapist fantasies are exactly those of the housewife in the treacly radio ballad. Instead of bittersweet introspection, however, she opts for more substantial coping strategies: tranquillisers, sessions with her psychoanalyst and pouring ‘neurotic effusions’ into her diaries. We encounter Elaine at various points in 1954 and 1955 as her marriage disintegrates, the ‘hysterical episodes’ multiply and she records ‘raw feelings … lacerated beyond reality’. 

Can this be ‘the acme of success for me?’ she wonders, faced yet again with ‘the daily dusting and tidying, the beds and the dishes’. Elaine has given up on her own writerly ambitions to play the role of ‘an obedient little faculty wife’. This involves single-handedly raising the