Self Abuse: love, loss and fatherhood Jonathan Self John Murray, 247pp, £16.99 ISBN 0719563259

A number of titles would have done equally well for this book. Self Obsessed, Self Satisfied and Self Deluding come to mind. On second thoughts, perhaps the author is perfectly aware that self-abuse is a euphemism for masturbation, in which case his choice of title is just fine. I don't mean to be unkind. In fact, my heart goes out to Jonathan Self for his appalling parents, and even more so to his poor children, on whom the sins of the grand- parents have been amply visited. It's just that I am not sure what is in it for the reader. Self's account of his undeniably troubled life left me feeling less like a fellow voyager than a reluctant voyeur, forced to watch something not very nice for no good reason.

Self's mother, a Jewish American nutcase who, in time- honoured fashion, used pregnancy to trap a man and lived to regret it, was emotionally and physically violent. "Her rule was absolute and she enforced it through a combination of fear, physical force, disapproval and sarcasm," writes Self. "You could never quite be certain how you stood with her. One minute you might be in favour, the next in disgrace, without any apparent reason for her change of heart." His father, a successful academic from an upper-middle- class English family, was just as bad, prone to smashing windows and egos with equal panache. "I hated everything about him."

Jonathan and his younger brother, the novelist Will Self, developed an array of survival strategies to cope with their parents' casual and routine psychological assaults. Jonathan developed a violent temper of his own; Will a vicious tongue. The Self boys seem to have been practised in various forms of furtive rebellion. Jonathan habitually stole money from his parents, became a compulsive eater, drank heavily and acquiesced, at the age of 13, to a homosexual affair with one of his schoolteachers. (He hated the sex, but revelled in the secrecy, in case you wished to know.)

Destructive behaviour of one sort or another, including rampant workaholism and a serious addiction to the white stuff, continued to dominate Self's adulthood. He beat his children, as his parents had beaten him, and, as a spouse, was as volatile and explosive as they had been. Eventually, with three sons and two failed marriages, as well as a lifestyle that involved commuting 150,000 miles a year from England to Australia but having a permanent home in neither, it was time for him to take stock.

At which point, out of the blue, after 200 pages detailing the horrors of his childhood, adolescence and deeply unappealing adulthood, the book lurches into a soupy, soft-focused happy ending. Just like that! From the mire of failure steps a reformed Self, glowing virtuously in the sunset. He has found a way, he assures us, to be a good, patient, loving father and, well, that's it. Feeling cheated? I'll say!

Central to Self's account of his life is the problem of how to be a halfway decent father when one's own father has only ever been the source of fear, mistrust and loathing; how to be a parent when one's entire life has been focused on being as unlike one's parents as possible. This psychological dilemma (familiar to many parents, albeit in less extreme forms) is the one really thought-provoking issue in the entire book - but, in Self's hands, it's like a bone on a string: whenever we get close, he tugs it out of reach again.

An autobiography that marches under the banner of unflinching honesty cannot succeed if it is noticeably more unflinching with some people than others, if the honesty is tinged with vindictiveness. At one point, Self recalls how, after his mother's death, he and his brother had "many hours of amusement" with her ashes, taking the urn to dinner parties, sending it postcards and leaving it phone messages. These are not flies and wanton boys, but grown men and their dead mother's charred remains. OK, so they had a terrible childhood, but this is not very funny.

In the past few years, there has been a glut of books on wretched childhoods, including Angela's Ashes, Flickerbook and Once in a House on Fire, to name three of the best. Self's book seems to expect a free ride on the genre without actually doing or saying anything new. So why does it fail to move? Perhaps it is the gratuitous name-dropping, or the blatant score-settling (the teacher is named, as is the school bully), or the faint but unmistakeable whiff of self-justification. What I do know is that tales of woe work best when there's redemption at the end, or else tragedy. Here we have neither. Self-justification, indeed.

Rebecca Abrams's most recent book is Three Shoes, One Sock and No Hairbrush (Cassell, £9.99)

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