If the narrative seems barely more than a barroom joke gussied up into short-story form, it’s clear that Welsh relishes the gory details as these naive, spoiled Americans are set upon first by an angry reptile, then by a couple of Mexican bandits. But what purpose does the bloody, saliva-soaked sadism that follows serve? And how did Welsh — whose finely tuned ear for dialect and slang made him one of the freshest voices of the ’90s — end up denoting Mexican accents (“feenish sucking hees deek . . . suck it like a leel gorl”) as if Speedy Gonzalez were directing gay porn?
“The DOGS of Lincoln Park” offers even less likely material for the rascally Edinburgher. Set far from some grimy Scottish barroom, the protagonists here, a trio of Sexand the City–ish Chicago rich girls, wile away humid afternoons in high-class restaurants. And when one of them discovers her little dog has gone missing, and fears it’s become lunch for the Korean chef who lives upstairs, it seems a silly, rather pointless plot turn.
Welsh — whose wife is from Chicago and who spends winters in Miami — seems to enjoy the chance to escape the stultifying gloom of the gray UK for the wide-open expanses of the USA. But he admits it’s a challenge to write first-person narratives about people with much different voices from his own. “You have to be a bit more careful about their internal dialogue,” he says. “It’s easier to do a Scottish person’s dialogue, someone from Edinburgh, because I’m from there. But it’s a lot harder to do someone who’s American or African or English or Russian.” (We’ll forgive him, then, for slipping Britishisms like “poxy” into a Yank’s interior monologue.)
If You Liked School works best when Welsh works closer to home, thematically and geographically. The long title story is a well-observed, good-hearted portrait of Mickey, a dim but likable ex-pat English barkeep trying to carve a new life on Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands. One would think a sun-kissed existence like that would be an easy one. And it might be, were it not for the competing needs of Mickey’s ex-wife, his girlfriend, his teenage daughter, and his hot-tempered Greek girl-on-the-side, each of whom gets a chapter named after her (“Trees,” “Cynth,” “Em,” “Seph”). Never mind the greasy gangster types who conspire to make his life interesting.
If Welsh isn’t in Scotland here, at least he’s in his element. The whisky flows in torrents. The fags are smoked with gusto. The naughty words let fly. If he was enjoying himself in Chicago or the Southwest desert, it’s in Mickey’s bar, the Herefordshire Bull — “a no-frills house of ill-repute of the sort you might actually find back home” — that Welsh really seems, well, at home.
And it’s in the book’s final story, the novella-length “Kingdom of Fife,” that the collection reaches full efflorescence. For all his far-flung globetrotting, Welsh works best when plumbing the corroded psychic depths of “a physically wee (but spiritually vast) country like Scotland.”
And so we meet Jason, a small but heavy-drinking jockey-turned-stable boy in Dunfermline, across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. And we meet Jenni, a wanderlustful 19 year old whose sole reason for staying in Cowdenbeath, her drab and dreary hometown, is Midnight, her beloved horse.
