style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">The problem with being a literary outsider is the lack of attention, or, rather, getting the wrong sort of attention. It’s all very well having your novels corralled into the “cult fiction” section of the bookshop or turning up on Amazon lists compiled by individuals with user names like “Nerdy boy”, but after a while such approbation begins to chafe. Our outsider hankers to produce an important doorstopper, the sort of book that will show his establishment rivals, with their prim realism and neatly pruned humour, how it’s done. Thus Will Self’s Umbrella : an ambitiously conceived and brilliantly executed novel in the high modernist tradition of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, which has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize.