Phone was published by Viking in 2017 as the concluding volume of Self’s modernist trilogy (after Umbrella and Shark). Like its predecessors, it is written as a single unbroken paragraph of stream-of-consciousness prose, but the formal challenge is now intensified: Self must render consciousness as it exists in the age of the smartphone — fragmented, perpetually interrupted, distributed across devices and networks.
The novel’s central concern is the smartphone as prosthetic consciousness. Characters do not simply use phones; their cognitive architectures have been reshaped by perpetual connectivity. Memory is externalized into search histories, attention is fractured by notifications, and the distinction between inner life and networked life collapses. Self’s stream-of-consciousness technique — developed in homage to Joyce and Döblin — becomes the perfect instrument for rendering this new cognitive reality, because digital consciousness, like Joycean consciousness, is associative, non-linear, and multiply layered.
The historical strands include the Iraq War (specifically British intelligence operations and the catastrophe of imperial overreach), the surveillance state enabled by communications technology, and Zack Busner’s advancing dementia — the dissolution of consciousness that has been the trilogy’s underlying subject from the beginning. Busner’s mental decline is not tragic in a conventional sense; it is presented as the natural endpoint of the fragmentation that technology and history have imposed on the modern mind.
Self has described Phone as “the last novel” — meaning not that he will write no more fiction, but that the novel form, as a coherent representation of individual consciousness, may have reached its terminus. If consciousness is now distributed across devices and networks rather than contained within a single skull, the novel’s founding assumption — that interiority can be represented in language — may no longer hold.
Collecting Phone
First edition (Viking, London, 2017): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$45
- Very good: $10–$25