In fact, it fits quite comfortably in the Nick Hornby canon.
“From what I can tell so far, adults have gotten a lot out of reading the book,” says Hornby. “It’s not as if it was, as it were, a ‘childish’ problem. I think, everyone can recognize the magnitude of what [Sam] is facing. And I hope people will find it gripping and funny and sad.”
Just think of it as another installment in the Y-chromosome chronicles from an author the New Yorker famously called “the maestro of the male confessional.”
In a very real way, Sam is just a younger version of Rob Fleming and Will Freeman, the thirty-something protagonists of High Fidelity and About a Boy — except he faces up to maturity 15 years earlier, and has an excuse to be acting like a teenager in the first place.
So, does Hornby, who started his career writing about the ways adults fetishize the artifacts of youth — record collections, sports on TV — feel like he’s settled into the cardigan and padded slippers of early dotage? “I think that my energy levels have remained fairly much the same,” he says. “I still want to write, I still want to do the things I haven’t done. I don’t feel ready to retire, that’s for sure.”
In fact, Hornby’s already at work on his next project, an “adult novel” with a character in his 20s. “The longer one’s writing career, the more one wants to write about people who are older than oneself or younger than oneself or a different sex from oneself or a different sexuality or whatever,” he says. “I don’t want to keep writing for and about my own age group.”
Bitter to the end
“Maybe getting older but not wiser would be the best way to sum it up,” says Welsh with a chuckle when reached by phone in Dublin. If the reformed wild man has a somewhat more sedate lifestyle now than in his younger days, his writerly proclivities still trend toward the decadent and depraved.
“Obviously, I am a different person,” he says. “I used to try to write just from emotion, from a lot of personal experiences, and a lot of subculture things I was involved with.” Nowadays, the writer who, 14 years ago, with wild, picaresque abandon, introduced us to Edinburgh’s druggy demimonde in Trainspotting, seems at once more deliberate (“much more of a composer, in a way,” he says of his craft) and more willing to push the envelope. He’s worldlier, too, even as his inimitable world-view remains the same.
Recently, in the course of rounding up a sheaf of short stories published separately in anthologies and magazines over the years, Welsh remembered something: writing short fiction is really fun. “So instead of putting these old stories together, I ended up writing a new bunch,” he says. “I sort of got the passion for the short story back again.”
You can tell from page one of If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work that Welsh is having a good time. In the first story, “Rattlesnakes,” a trio of fried San Franciscans, on their way back from the Burning Man festival, are waylaid in the Nevada desert, where one of them has the distinct misfortune of getting his trousersnake bitten by a rattlesnake. Someone, of course, must suck the poison out.
