Its frontage -- that which it flashes at an unwilling public -- promises the steamy stamen eroticism of Mapplethorpe. It's a vulvic lily, seductively curled, open, waiting. It suggests, yes, sex as surely as any scantily-clad Black Lace paperback. And there is sex here. It -- and tobacco -- were abiding passions for our narrator, the American Lily Bloom who smoked herself to an early grave in May 1988.

Less grave, actually, more a grubby basement flat (shared with the all too solid evidence of past deeds) in Dalston, sneaked in there between Islington and Hackney; literally where the dead live. There are two daughters left behind, one, Charlotte, a pinch-perfect petit snob, the other the self-destructive junkie Natasha. Daughters Lily takes to haunting when she's not dealing with the mechanics of the afterlife: the assignment of the dead by the Deatheaucracy Office; the Full Dead breakfasts chewed and regurgitated (the departed have neither the taste nor the need for food, just its ritual); the evening meets of the 12-step Personally Dead, as though mortality were an addiction to be conquered. At least freed from corporeality Lily is free to smoke like the proverbial chimney. Her guide through all of this is the Australian mystic Phar Lap Dixon, proprietor of an achingly fashionable restaurant chain duplicating the Bush eating experience called Nowhere.

The novel's thrust is more towards the surrealist fabulism of Self's debut, My Idea of Fun, than his last, that over-extended conceit Great Apes. But it's also very consciously a crossover; the bridging loan between the look-at-me thesaurusism of his early work and an attempt at addressing the weightier matters (this is marinated in the Big D after all) that must fall upon spindly shoulders as middle-age, a brace of marriages, dead parents and a despond of Selflettes vie for attention. (Drugs, he says, belong to the old world, too.)

Consequently, although the textured language is familiar, beneath the slough of punnery ("Toque of the devil", "Schindler's lift") and alliteration lurks a darker, more elegiac Self. The initial sections dealing with Lily's death are surprisingly moving, reminding us that this gnomically titled book resembles nothing so much as a Western materialist Book of The Dead. Or arthouse afterlife favourite Wings of Desire restyled by (Self hero) Mike Leigh.

Lily observes the last decade only as it relates to her current predicament: Tianemen, Lockerbie, Hillsborough. "Even the most crushing events," she says, "can acquire an unwarranted irony -- when you're dead." But the form also gives warrant for some Self-righteous anger -- hatred of the past, of Lily's own Jewish anti-Semitism, and hatred of those who hate. It's an assured portrait of an ageing Jewish American woman (modelled, he admits, partially on his own late mother) washed up on London shores.

None of which will convince the detractors. The precious, prinking language and book-learning (his own short story 'Scale' to Joyce to Burroughs to borrowing a title from dull old Derek Raymond) is as up-front and precocious as ever, while the social comedy can, equally, be harsh. (Some, for example, will take exception to the Soho nailbomb as literary device.) Verily, the BritLit Woody Allen strikes again; Love and Death, London suburban style.