It is difficult to speak of a few, specific social concerns in Self's How the Dead Live because the novel is full of social commentary. Large sections of the book are devoted to minute historical and political critique.

As Lily Bloom lays on her deathbed—and later as she sits and reflects after her death— she spends a great deal of time going over major political and cultural events of the last fifty years. Self criticizes the popularity of psychoanalysis in the fifties, nostalgically commemorates the political activism of the sixties, satirizes the weight-loss crazes of the seventies and eighties, and jokes about the political scandals of the nineties (i.e., the Clintons). And, through it all, he is, of course, quite merciless in his critiques of the middle class and its banal, homogenous desires. However, if readers were to attempt to articulate a...