‘Irvine Welsh – all the 20-year-olds love him’ – woman in her 50s behind the counter in the small independent Lake Geneva bookshop who sold me this book.

As I’ve noted before elsewhere on this site, ‘poet Laureate of the chemical generation’ (a dubious honour at best) Irvine Welsh’s work can vary from great to grating. ‘If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work’ is no different, in that it embraces both extremes of the word-quality spectrum at times, making for a very uneven work altogether. The book comprises four short stories and a novella, which brings to mind the format of the classic ‘The Acid House,’ though the short pieces are far longer than most of the ones in that 1994 short story collection – and often nowhere near as good.

The first short tale is called ‘Rattlesnakes’ and concerns three young Americans who crash their vehicle in the Nevada desert on their way back from the Burning Man festival. They are held at gunpoint by a sociopathic Mexican (whose dialogue sounds like a reedeeculous raceest cartoon rendeetion of thee way Heespaneecs speak, eh greengo) who just happens to be driving through the area at the same time. Therein follows a tableau involving a snakebitten penis, a forced homosexual oral sex act…and not much of interest, to be perfectly honest. The rape is a vile scene (not for nothing is the writer friends with the talentless pulp friction factory Chuck Palahniuk) that fits perfectly along with the other sick sex scenes that Welsh seems to delight in using regularly for some reason I have never really understood (apart from the juvenile gross-out factor involved – least there was no dog torture in this book) and really bores as much as it nauseates. Welsh invents back stories for three of the four main characters, but seems to forget to invent the same for the fourth; it’s like he either forgot or couldn’t care less about such careless plotting. Overall, ‘Rattlesnakes’ is no great shakes (of a rattling snaketail) and is basically a better-forgotten waste of words, notable only in that it is the first of three works in the book using American characters as its base.

‘If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work’ concerns the exploits of dodgy diamond geezah Cockney Mikey Baker, who owns a Costa Brava bar; some could-be gangsters, and Baker’s teenage daughter when she is visiting him from England. Whilst once again this is not exactly hugely engrossing, what is enjoyable is Welsh’s rendition of Baker’s outrageous Londoner verbal rhythms and decadent cadences. The writer must know somebody this is based on, or have listened enough to Cockneys to render them pretty downpat(ois), and it’s a joy to read. Welsh’s main writing strength, to my mind, has always been his rendition of working class speech, and in this story he really, for me, nails Cockney. However, this story, like the preceding one, reads like a full-length project aborted partway through, but stuck in here so the new-direction-experimental wordwork won’t just be wasted; there is a subplot involving Baker’s missing daughter that is wrapped up far too easily in a few penstrokes, as if the writer just got bored of what he was writing and decided to finish with it. ‘School’ is definitely worth reading for Welsh’s sui generis vernacular-rendition gift but is ultimately a sloppy, stroppy, unsatisfying read. Third effort ‘The DOGS of Lincoln Park’ (an area of Chicago) is a tedious, pointless tale, which revolves around a racist-seeming caricature of a Korean chef (nobody ever accused Welsh of being PC), his supposed dog-killing-and-cooking exploits, and a career-girl clique of vapid yuppie Windy City bimbettes. I don’t have much to say about this one except it is, once again, a waste of words. What it did come across as is Welsh cruelly caricaturing young yuppie women of the type he must have encountered through the company of his 20-years-younger Chicago-born wife; in this it’s a vaguely interesting sociological and psychological document, American middle class females as seen through the eye of Scotland’s premiere no-class-allegiance writer (funny to me, as a now-Chicago-resident Scottish man, to see areas of the city I recognize mentioned), but it’s still a boring and stupid waste of time. And I bet it pissed his wife’s pals off too. Or at least I hope it did, if they’re anything like the women here.

I’m going to skip ahead here to the book’s closing piece, ‘The Kingdom of Fife.’ This novella is very familiar Welsh territory, in that it deals with a disaffected, very sleazy, intelligent drink-and-drug-abusing Scottish (un)working class man in his early 20s, Jason King (dunno why he’s named after a 70s telly programme featuring a leading man with a huge porno moustache), and his misadventures in Cowdenbeath in Fife. It’s rendered in the Scottish vernacular, and as ever Welsh’s ear for this slanguage is unparalleled (except maybe for James Kelman’s). It’s interesting to see how the writer reckons people from Fife (wonder if he has friends from there to listen to and transcribe) and those from Edinburgh (his primary literary haunt) sound different, although his primary vision of this difference seems to be that Fifers say ‘hoor’ instead of ‘radge’ every third word.

But this observation doesn’t mean I’m denigrating this entertainingly degenerate work, far from it. Though its ‘escape to sunny Spain’ fantasy seems quaint and to belong to 90s Scottish/Britpop/rave literature, as usual it’s the raw un-PC strength of the prose, and its jet-black humour, that keep things moving along nicely. It presents itself as being quasi-realistic then veers off into a ludicrous subplot involving a severed stolen head (lopped off in a scene that pays ‘homage’ to the Alan Warner short story in the Clocktower Press short story anthology ‘Ahead of Its Time’ that I can’t remember the name of right now, can’t find online, and my copy is in Scotland so I can’t check it!), but with Welsh I find it best these days to just go with the wordflow and just enjoy wherever the writer’s hilariously demented imagination takes me without trying to impose too much linear narrative or realism on it.

‘Fife’ also seems to satirize the self-reflexive-and-self-mocking artist’s earlier football casual friction-fiction excesses, in that King plays Subbuteo (a table football game using tiny plastic figures popular in the 1970s) and is a drunken waster bombscare at matches, getting banned for this. The way he gets his ban lifted is both funny and disturbing, a twin leitmotif that could describe much of Welsh’s work. But what I like most about it is when he writes something so absolutely fucking outrageous or over-the top (I loved the 50 Cent-listening hopeless-Scottish-socialist-autodidact-archetype dad) you can almost imagine him laughing like hell and sticking it down cos he knows it’ll offend a few people, and give a few more a laugh, y’know, stuff like (from page 252 of the American edition, about a young often-beat-up man who gets a job with ScotRail):

”Of course, they wanted Richey as the poster boy fir thir anti violence against staff campaign. Telt the hoor ehs look possessed jist the right amount ay pathos. Said thit he could be a celebrity, like thon black hoor wi the bottom-ay-coke-boatil glesses fae the Halifax.”

Now. I have to explain that for non-Brits. The aforementioned ‘black hoor’ was the mascot for the Halifax building society in Britain a few years ago. He was bald and black and did indeed have thick Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. And it’s lines like this, completely over-the-top, that had me laughing out loud many a time during the reading of this excellent story. King is not trying to be racist here, he/the writer is just describing the financial advertising icon in white trash terms without censoring himself; this is actually the way some Scottish people talk. And it’s funny as fuck, as is stuff like describing a horse as ‘Ya dirty big fower-legged long-faced hoarsey bastard that ye are!’ after jealously musing about the size of its equestrian genitalia; or describing Tony ‘Wandering Desert Wilderness Messiah’ Blair as having a ‘hoor’s mooth’ and suggesting he must have made a fortune whilst studying at Fettes by sucking cock.

I personally think ‘The Kingdom of Fife’ is one of the best things Irvine Welsh has ever written, even if the vision he presents of contemporary Scotland is oddly all-white – but maybe he doesn’t get back to Scotland much after moving first to Chicago (and now to Dublin) and isn’t quite aware how much the place has changed population-race-mix-wise over the last few years. Who knows. But this book is worth reading for this howlingly hilarious work alone. Trust me.

And it’s also worth reading for one other short story, the fourth. ‘Miss Arizona’ is the longest piece I can recall Welsh ever writing from the point of view of American character (the first would be the superb and hilarious short story ‘The Two Philosophers’ from ‘The Acid House’) and it’s a word-craftsman revelation. It concerns grizzled 38-year-old West Texan native filmmaker/writer Raymond Wilson Butler who gets more than he bargained for when he starts to interview the wife of a now-deceased film director he idolizes.

When I said this story is a revelation, I meant it. It’s the first time this notorious writer has ever written a prolonged piece (as far as I can remember, though I may be wrong) that’s not from the point of view of somebody from the UK (or more specifically Scotland, though he has created characters from other parts of the UK, mostly England) and he’s done a fine job of it. I don’t know what real Texans would make of it, not hanging out with many of them, but Butler’s interior monologue flawlessly worked for me, conjuring up a working personality of an American artist and his internal machinations. I also think, and obviously this is just my interpretation (as is any review, obviously), that ‘Miss Arizona’ contains elements of autobiography – after all, an artist who constructs shallow female characters (which Welsh has often been accused of) writing a work finds new inspiration through hooking up with a 17-years-his-junior woman and gains precious new insight into the female psyche and how to nail it to the page. I think the writer’s move to America (after years of globetrotting) has been a liberating one for him, in that it has severed some old dead Scottish ties that blind in his mind, and has given him renewed energy and inspiration and greatly expanded artistic horizons and canvases to work on. Take, for example, this part of a paragraph from page 188 of the American edition:

“I drove hard for a bit, trying to make good time on the highway so that I could goof off part of the journey along the back roads. A long red twilight, broken only by south-headin doves in flight for the river, stretched out before me as I slid off the interstate. I loved passin through them small towns, all the time hearin the thud and cranking of digging machines, and as the night fell, the barking of dogs and the mariachi music, while the low trees, covered as they were with insects, clicked, snapped, and whirred their own little tunes.”

That’s a beautiful piece of method-actor writing (so utterly unlike the artist’s usual voice I found myself cynically wondering if he had actually written it), and reveals colours to Welsh’s word-palette that he literally has never explored before poetry and feel-for-word-wise. It’s the voice of an older, wiser man, pausing and taking reflection and seems studied, worked on, as opposed to the endless lazy tedious reams of ‘neck an ecky ya radge cunt n fuck thae wee hoors fi Muirhoose n let’s go watch the Hibees’ worthless crap a lot of his other work encompasses. The ‘Trainspotting’-era Scottish-parochial junkie-chic Irvine Welsh could never in a million years have written this story, in part because it deals with the joys of reciprocated emotion in a mature and revealing and revealing new way that the man has never really written about before. ‘Miss Arizona’ comes across as somebody being newly mellow in life, off the drink and allowing himself to be warmed by the roaring internal brushfire of no clear origin or destination, love.

Of course, how much of this directly correlates to the life of the writer only he will know, but it was interesting to see in his last novel ‘The Bedroom Secrets of The Master Chefs’ that the main character Skinner in that book was only happy when he left Scotland for America and ended up in love with an American woman in San Francisco. Whatever. These could-be Rorschach musings say just as much about this reader (after all, people don’t read books, books read people) as the psyche and artistic methodology of the artist under discussion, but it’s just the sort of musing that amuses me, so make of it what you will or won’t or want.

Whatever else, though, I think that ‘Miss Arizona’ points the way to emotional and poetic artistic directions for Welsh that could be very interesting, should he choose to pursue them. I may well be wrong, of course, but I sometimes wonder how much the man feels trapped by his whole rave-era-defining smackhead novel and the not-particularly-high artistic expectations it engendered in him because of its huge success. Much of his work is simply slapdash and lazy, thrown together for an audience he knows will buy anything he writes cos, well, all the 20-year-olds love him, everybody knows that.

But for a writer with a serious bone in his body, and Welsh definitely has a few alongside his sick juvenile splatterporn riffs, having to write for (and thus sometimes water down your message)(or maybe he doesn’t cos that’s the level and age his thought processes have developed to) people less than half your age (he’s 49) would be incredibly limiting and frustrating. I think the people who have grown up with his work, at least those who haven’t abandoned it as feeling they have outgrown it, would be interested to see what the writer could do from a more adult perceptive perspective. Or at least I know I would, having been reading his work for 13 years or so now. I think the next book from this sporadically-interesting novelist could be really interesting emotionally and stylistically if he forgets about Scotland, or at least about his youthful audience, and tells us what growing older is like in his weird wild twisted world and head. I for one would be interested to see what’s in there. Judging by ‘Miss Arizona,’ the results could be very interesting and heartening indeed.

Or maybe not. Who knows, only time and Welsh will tell that particular tale.