Shark was published by Bloomsbury in 2014 as the second volume in what Self calls his “Modernist trilogy” (following Umbrella, preceding Phone). The novel continues the story of Zack Busner and employs the same formal technique: a single unbroken paragraph of stream-of-consciousness prose that moves freely across decades and between multiple consciousnesses.
The historical anchor this time is the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 — one of the most destructive single acts of warfare in history, in which American B-29 bombers dropped incendiary bombs on the densely packed wooden neighborhoods of eastern Tokyo, killing over 100,000 people in a single night. Self connects this atrocity to the postwar psychiatric treatment of military veterans, to the pharmaceutical industry’s colonization of mental health, and to Busner’s own declining years in the 2010s.
The “shark” of the title operates as a governing metaphor: death circling beneath the surface of consciousness, visible only in peripheral glimpses, its presence felt as a disturbance in the water rather than a direct sighting. Self’s technique — the flowing, associative, temporally unmoored prose — mirrors this: mortality is not confronted directly but apprehended through the movement of language itself, through the way memory and trauma surface and submerge.
Collecting Shark
First edition (Bloomsbury, London, 2014): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$25