Short Stories:Sex is boring. But don't just take my word for it. See Michel Foucault, in "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress", in Hubert L Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (University of Chicago, 1982).
Foucault says: "I must confess that I am more interested in problems about techniques of the self and things like that rather than sex . . .sex is boring.'
Or see Irvine Welsh's If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, his new collection of five short stories (or rather, four short stories, and one long story, or novella). Because here also, sex is boring.
In the first story, Rattlesnakes, three young Americans - Scott, Madeline and Eugene - are driving in the Nevada desert. They crash their car. There's a sandstorm. A rattlesnake bites Eugene in a place no man would wish to be bitten. Or as Eugene puts it (because he's American), "a rattlesnake bit my cack!". How to remove the poison? You guessed it . . . A porno/exploitation/grindhouse encounter follows with some passing Latinos. "You should tell this beetch to shut her fucking mouth or she will get you all keeled", that sort of thing. The story is pretty limp.
In the magnificently titled title story, If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, Mickey is running a pub, the Herefordshire Bull, in Corralejo, in Fuerteventura, and enjoys servicing numerous local ladies. "I think I got right up between here there and then, I believe that to be the case, but I was too firkin rat-arsed to remember much about it." "Nailing her was the wrong farking move." Et cetera.
But when Welsh is not merely banging on about sex, things improve. He has a gift for bizarre, Twilight Zone-ish tales of the unexpected, combined with a deadpan, withering humour ("Her mum thought that gourmet cooking was putting a load of fish fingers under the grill instead of in the frying pan"). In The DOGS of Lincoln Park, he comes up with a nice twist on an urban myth about a Korean chef, a missing dog, and a group of Sex and the City-style career women. In Miss Arizona he writes an amusing schlock plot involving human taxidermy. And in the final long story, Kingdom of Fife, set in Cowdenbeath, he's finally back on safe home territory, writing in his trademark Scottish demotic about an aspiring table-football player.
It's all good, clean, pulp-fiction fun, although occasionally the tone does wobble and Welsh comes across as all serious and writerly. "Madeline was trying to get a signal on her cellphone. In the storm the device seemed a useless and dead artifact, technology rendered impotent and void by nature's whims: complacent men against indifferent gods." "The Saturday morning dawns muggy, the chirping of the birds in the oak tree outside particularly bellicose as Kendra wakes up, blinking in the striped sunlight pouring through the blinds."
In the Korean chef story there is perhaps a little too much undigested research: "Pointing at some small bowls of soup, Chef explains, - Maeuntang is spicy, hot seafood soup that include white fish, vegetable, bean curd, red-pepper powder. Twoenjang-guk is a fermented soybean paste soup with baby clams in its broth."
The not inconsiderable pleasure to be derived from reading Irvine Welsh, right from his debut in the low-life, high-jinks Trainspotting, is the pleasure of watching the author pleasuring himself; the same kind of pleasure to be had from watching a puppy chasing its own tail, say. He can be slapdash, sketchy, and silly, but there's no doubt that he's writing at full pelt, like his own screenwriter in Miss Arizona: "I pulverized that goddamn keyboard, scarcely believing those fingers were mine . . . I was blazin, locked into my subconscious, and the pages were flying out of me." At his absolute best, he's buzzing. At his worst, he's a bore.
Ian Sansom is the author of the Mobile Library series of novels, and is writer in residence at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University Belfast
Short Stories: If You Liked School, You'll Love Work By Irvine Welsh Jonathan Cape, 391pp. £11.99