If You Liked Trainspotting, You’ll Love This

Irvine Welsh’s If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work includes four short stories and one novella. The short stories cover more conventional American turf than do many of his past works, with a couple of stories set in the American Southwest, and one in suburban Chicago (and a final one across the shore set in Costa Brava), yet still capture a deeper exploration of some of the classic horror stories, urban legends and reversals of urban legends that you might find in the work of Chuck Palahniuk. Welsh is the kind of guy you could imagine bringing the Ryan’s Steakhouse Story to life in cringing, vivid Technicolor. One has to only remember the “Worst Toilet in Scotland” scene from Trainspotting to see how short of stretch that actually is.

But the crown jewel of If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work is the concluding novella set in Cowdenbeath, Scotland, “The Kingdom of Fife”, which interleaves the stories of the unemployed four-foot seven ex-jockey and competitive table football (i.e., Subbuteo) player Jason King and the depressed horse jumper Jenni Cahill. In alternating chapters, we get pulled into the visceral, utterly unpretentious and earthy world of Jason, who lives with his father (a dispossessed middle-age white man in Scotland who listens to 50 Cent and finds kinship with the plight of the African-American) and between nights of drinking the “black gold” (pints of Guinness) at the local bar called the Goth, stalks Jenni and schemes how to make some money. Jason narrates in the first person, in a kind of phonetic Scottish dialect that at first can be hard to parse but after a few chapter flows and resonates in the ear. (Sample translations: Ehs == He’s, goat == got, yin == one, tae == to, doon == down.)

For her part, Jenni is the lesser light to her more outwardly beautiful and more talented friend who also jumps showhorses (with more success–Jenni’s horse is a lame burden upon her family.) Jenni is of a higher class–her narration is more straightforward linguistically and captures the angst of a miserable emo listening to Marilyn Manson alone in her room, plotting her escape from Cowdenbeath.

Welsh’s novella covers a wide emotional range in just a couple of hundred pages, and despite the trials, slights, deaths and travails that befall Jason and Jenni, conveys to the reader Jason’s relentlessly realistic and optimistic outlook. Jason’s foibles are readily admitted and owned shamelessly, making him someone you can root for, warts and all.

It’s hard not to see this novella—which carries echoes of Trainspotting, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Ulysses, and a kind of bizarro-world The Graduate— not being optioned for a screenplay. Like the wee Jason, it may end up being a wee movie, but a wee one that I would pay to see.

If you’re patient enough to work through the dialect, If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work is without a doubt one of the most gritty (not quite filthy) and heartwarming stories you’ll read this year.

More links:

• If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work
• Irvine Welsh’s website