If You Liked School, You'll Love Work by Irvine Welsh(W.W. Norton, 2007)
A group of young heroin addicts, alternately hunching over the toilet and maligning the British state, soared to new fictional heights in Irvine Welsh's 1994 novel Trainspotting. Trash- talking Scots quickly became smart literary heroes, their lawless and vulgar habits serving up more than incidental laughs (though there were plenty of those, too). The train-spotters had another round of raunch in 2001's Porno, recovering from heroin with a dive into the adult movie industry. No shortage of gross-out moments there, either, but Porno was another fearlessly written social fable that nicely updated some very memorable characters. Welsh's other notables, Filth; Glue; The Acid House; are equally (and not just in name) interested in the substance of the subversive, and satisfy to varying degrees.
Welsh's new short story collection, If You LIked School, You'll Love Work, is of the same mold -- one that, after more than a decade, is it a bit wobbly. The collection feels recycled, as if its characters auditioned for an earlier Welsh novel but didn't quite make the cut. This group of B-listers is haphazardly paired off and sent in different geographic directions but are all stuck in the same general story; someone or another sleeping with someone else, falling in and out of some kind of trouble and occasionally cursing in frustration about the first two. Women are petty, foreign characters used for over-the-top comic relief, instead of the wise-cracking, cunning foils of previous works. We get the sense we've been here, wherever that is, before.
Even venturing outside the UK doesn't seem to add an extra punch. Three of the collection's five stories are set in the United States: "Rattlesnakes," "The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park," and "Miss Arizona." But they offer little in the way of regional flare and instead only confirm Welsh's interest in exposing folks this side of the Atlantic as equally loathsome. Young women in Chicago, we learn, "had been unable to come up with suitable reasons for their ennui, and had overindulged in illegal drugs and alcohol as a convenient repository for their tired, listless, alienated behavior". This is just the sort of dull, wordy observation that might keep a blogger in business but stalls any chance at really good storytelling. It is also precisely the type of overdone academic language Welsh spent a decade mocking. Bizarrely, the relocation to the United States becomes a major hurdle for the dialogue-savvy Welsh – leading to uneasy narration and immature prose. At the end of these stories the reader feels defeated from having spent a good 20 minutes trying to rouse any real interest.
Welsh's trademark Scottish dialect surfaces in the novella "The Kingdom of Fife"; the barely decipherable speech belonging to the type of womanizer/drifter/alcoholic who seems a permanent fixture in the Scotland of Welsh's imagination. Unfortunately, Jason, the latest to fill this role, is all accent and no action. This story runs through the predictable range of sexual scheming and violent urging, but never gets off the ground. How many times can we share in the laugh when our protagonist once again insults a woman for being too fat, or a man for being a wimp? An unhappy outburst from Jason, "In capitalist development wir much air along the Bulgarian-Romanian lines, thin the likes ay the Czech Republic or any ay they new trendy Baltic States. Mair cappuccino outlets in Tallinn or Riga thin Central Fife: that all' wager!", rings delightfully of an earlier Welsh. Yet I suspect most readers, after this many false-starts, will wish for more than just this throwback.
The title story, told by a British ex-pat named Michael running a bar in Spain, is the book's most satisfying. Its lightness does justice to the narrator's sole ambition-to sleep with a lot of women. This he pursues only after grudgingly meeting the demands of a concerned ex-wife that he keep his daughter out of trouble. Out of his bachelor's burden comes the quip of advice from which the book derives its title but, beyond this, we are spared any major attempts at commentary that would weigh its humor down -- unlike the other stories, this one knows its limits. The prose is funny and forthright, a respite from the other overworked tales. Says Michael at the story's end: "Still, with a bit of calmness and serenity, there ain't no hurdle that can't be negotiated". Hopefully, Welsh himself shares in this prophecy.
