The front cover of Will Self’s new novel carries a distorted shot of his face, and the author’s note warns of details which are ‘manifestly a product of the narrator’s delusions’. From these clues it is fairly obvious what will happen in Walking to Hollywood. Clearly, it is going to be one of those stories where the narrator, a writer plagued by obsessive-compulsive disorder, has a turbulent friendship with a dwarf named Sherman whose colossal sculptures of the human body have made him hugely successful, and then takes a trip to North America, joined by Sherman, who has smuggled himself into hand luggage – until this last detail turns out to be a fantasy of the narrator, who is loosely based on the author. In between catching up with Sherman, ‘Will Self’ attempts suicide, meets David Thewlis, who, he decides, would be perfect to play him in a biopic, and visits Disneyland.

In part two, ‘Walking to Hollywood’, the plot swerves into uncharted territory. Back home, ‘Will Self’ tells his psychiatrist that he is going to walk to Hollywood, minus the flight from Heathrow to LA. He stops by the filming of Quantum of Solace for a graphically violent fight scene with Daniel Craig, and bumps into Scooby-Doo. He meets a hip-hop quartet called NWPhD, who rap bilingual versions of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Next, ‘Will Self’, who is being ‘played by’ David Thewlis and Pete Postlethwaite alternately, turns into a superhero and rapes a car. In part three, ‘Will Self’ has Alzheimer’s and visits the North-East coast, allowing for a much longer and less entertaining version of one of his Independent columns about walking around.

Walking to Hollywood may come across as a series of attention-seeking gimmicks. But it can be oddly absorbing, simply because of the author’s remarkable mental energy. Give Self an image and he can think up twenty possibilities for it; give him a combination of words and he can expand it in twenty different directions. Self’s mannered tone can be very funny, as with his determined effort to throw off one of the most intimidating of literary influences by referring to him throughout as ‘Uncle Vladimir’. And the encounter with NWPhD is a witty set-piece: when ‘Will Self’ challenges the group’s translation, he is asked menacingly, ‘You dig Aurelius?’ He stammers: ‘Well, I think it’s very important to remain stoical in the face of, you know...stuff.’

But the better moments only produce the impression of unusual and sparkling gifts being poured silently down the drain. The novel is meant to be satirical, but the satire can’t survive in such a chaotic environment. It bears repeating that there is nothing so boring as a non-stop series of surprises, and that if you say goodbye to structure you lose any possibility of creating tension. What’s more, the novel’s tricksiness and self-reflexivity are blunt weapons against its possible targets – Hollywood, the culture of psychiatric treatment, modernity in general – all of which are quite self-referential enough as it is.