What do we know about Will Self?

That he’s an uncircumcised half-American Jew? That he was a regular doper by the time he turned 15? That he woke up at 21 spooked to find himself far from the prestigious author he imagined? That he is a pal of Martin Amis? That he marched for Irish Republicanism in the early 80s? That he obsesses on Burroughs and idolises Ballard? That his preferred multi-syllabic word is the mighty shibboleth? That he was once Job Centre-interviewed by serial killer Dennis Nielsen?

All this we know about Will Self, and Junk Mail isn’t even a book about Will Self.

Junk Mail (and you can be sure of the premeditation in the title) is a collection of journalism, odds and sods that don’t march behind the fiction banner. The first part - ‘On Drugs’ - is on drugs. Write what you know, they say, and Will Self knows a lot about drugs and a lot about William Burroughs: both stand him in good stead, whether reviewing Burroughs’ letters or visiting a progressive prison rehab, or showing Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch to largely disinterested junkies.

The remainder is less formal, an assembly of profiles, book reviews, interviews, funnies for their own sake. They are intercut with a selection of his slightly surreal, slightly (occasionally very) funny cartoons. The profiles - mostly for the Evening Standard - are the weak link. Anti-psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, authors Tim Willocks, Bret Easton Ellis, ‘artist’ Damien Hirst: they are all too brief, slavish to newsprint and not their subjects. Szasz (he does not subscribe to the idea that mental illness, drug addiction and the rest are ‘diseases’) is clearly more interesting than the space allowed, while the grim Hirst barely merits the scant paragraphs he’s allotted. Only the recent Martin Amis Esquire reprint gets to any meat.

Better are Self’s investigations: in Northern Ireland; in search of Satanic abuse; and a terrific think-piece on English Culture, penned largely for The Guardian and Observer. It’s obvious in these how the writer adapts himself for the territory. The humorous ones (and they are labelled as such to make sure you get the message) labour under Self-language, a dictionary stew ladeled over his short stories and wonderful novel, My Idea of Fun. Rich and Self-conscious, they drip with shibboleths, literary allusion and bad jokes. He’s good at bad jokes. It’s an art learned, he explains, in a childhood passion for Woody Allen: ‘I may have been a pretentious and culturally omnivorous adolescent, but it was exclusively the strength of Allen’s one-liners, and the precision of his comic timing, that fuelled my admiration,’ he writes. ‘Eight Miles High’, his Idler piece on first-class flying - ‘the heroin of travel’ - is textbook funny.

Junk Mail, however, almost saves the best for last. In 1994 he interviewed JG Ballard for the London Evening Standard but the return from the paper was all too brief. Here it lives again in all its 40-page glory, a spectacular, free-ranging chat on drugs, Burroughs and Rushing to Paradise. There has scarcely been a better interview with Ballard in recent years.

It’s perhaps disappointing that space hasn’t been found in here for Self’s brilliant Radio 4 defence of King Kong, or indeed the odd transcript of his Cult Books features for Radio 1, along with his recent, pithy restaurant reviews for The Observer, but there is always the next volume. And on this standing, there will very definitely have to be a next volume.