THE GOOD TIMES
By James Kelman
About halfway through James Kelman's new collection of short stories, The
Good Times, I started thinking it would be fun to compare Kelman, a resident
of Glasgow, with his fellow Scot Irvine Welsh (author of Trainspotting
and most recently Filth). Reading their latest work back-to-back, I
couldn't resist having a contest to see which author had used the word
"fuck" the most on a single page. To my surprise, Kelman won. The
grand prize goes to page 30, where you can find twenty of them.
Coarse language, however, only masks the essentially conservative
sensibilities of both writers. Kelman (a winner of the Booker Prize in 1994) is
a sentimental writer, especially when it comes to relationships, just as Welsh,
for all his ravings on life in the gutter, is really an old-fashioned moralist.
In terms of style the two diverge sharply. Welsh's obscenity has a music to
it, and his use of language goes back through Burgess to Joyce. Kelman, on the
other hand, is more of a diamond in the working-class rough, and prefers to
write in a kind of inarticulate stutter: "Right Colin, he said, right, I
think I know, I think it was to do with eh like eh I mean how eh it's just
because . . . it's that kind of thingwi, it's that, it's that that makes her the
eh . . . that gives her the eh . . . ". Nobody will mistake this for the
beautiful voice of fine writing.
Unlike most literary short story collections, The Good Times has no
continuity in either character or location. Instead, the links tend to be
thematic. The narrators, all male, are all haunted by what one of them calls
"human absence." A boy investigating an abandoned building is deserted
by his mates, a young man dreams of his estranged girlfriend's return, a husband
and father drifts away from his family, a homeless man can't stop thinking of a
woman who never showed up to meet him at a pub.
It is a fiction of withdrawal - into revery, delusion, and even paranoia.
"Not necessarily depressed," one of the characters puts it, "But
maybe just out of things."
In what may be an attempt to compound the anxiety there are no quotation
marks or even dashes to indicate direct speech. Many times the line gets blurred
between what is being said and what is being thought. In addition, so much of
the presentation is done through dialogue and reflection that it is sometimes
difficult to understand what is going on. The importance of dramatic action
diminishes as the physical world begins to fade. A knocking at the door goes
unanswered. Nobody lifts the phone when it rings.
This emphasis on alienation makes Kelman a hard author to finally respond to.
I have to admit that I found The Good Life , like How Late It Was, How
Late, frustrating and incomplete. It is as though Kelman has become one of
his characters - trapped in a mental box while struggling to say something that
never quite gets expressed. There are moments of light, but then the blinds are
pulled and the door is closed.
Notes:
Review first published October 17, 1998.
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