Adding a Little Grit to Modern Novels

In Irvine Welsh we have one of the rawest writers to appear on the scene since the Beats of the ‘50s, the New Journalists of the ‘60s and the Realists of the ‘80s.

His gritty style is so new--a sort of literary hip-hop--critics have been stumbling over each other to offer a cultural context for his work (“voice of the ghetto,” “poet laureate of the chemical generation,” “the chronicler of the ecstasy generation”) and to compare him to someone familiar (William Burroughs seems to hit the keyboard most).

Welsh, 37, is an up-to-date documentarian of inner-city decay, modern morality and depression-ridden coming-of-age. His style is physically detailed, phonetically literal and internally logical. “I think what you can’t make up is that cultural context,” he says. “I like to feel as if I’m kind of immersed in the culture.”

But one thing makes Welsh stand out even more: He’s Scottish. His youth terrain revolves around the ghettos of Scotland--a new heroin hot zone for Europe.

It is ironic, in a way, that it takes a Scotsman to show us the depths of urban life, the logic of drug abuse, the reasons for criminal being and even the politics behind a new generation of youth culture. That’s what Welsh does in “Trainspotting,” his first novel out now in paperback from W.W. Norton and soon to be released stateside as a motion picture from Miramax (directed by Danny Boyle, it opens coast to coast July 19).

“The modern novel seems to be very much rooted in this middle-class, self-conscious literary tradition,” Welsh says in a phone call from his native Edinburgh, where he’s visiting from his new home in Amsterdam. “When I first started writing I thought it wouldn’t really appeal to anyone because the audience I was writing to didn’t really read books.”

His working-class point of view might be a fresh addition to the American bookshelf. “In America, when so many young writers are coming out of Ivy League colleges, they’re writing from a position of relative comfort,” says Steven Daly, a Scots author and journalist based in New York. “That’s why there’s such a relative immediacy to his stuff here.”

The success of “Trainspotting” in Europe both as book (it has sold several hundred thousand copies) and movie (the buzz of the Cannes Film Festival, it’s the second biggest box office hit in British history) has made Welsh a taste-maker. “In the same way that somebody can take hold of the public cultural imagination in the way Quentin Tarantino has done in America,” Daly says, “that’s what Irvine Welsh has done in Britain.”

Welsh has already emerged as a thoughtful voice about drug culture, both doubting legal double standards and touting psychedelics: “They’ll always be there.”

“Trainspotting”--named for the sport of watching trains, but perhaps metaphorically referring to the vein-spotting of opiate addicts--documents the party-hardy, couch-surfing, pub-crawling lives of a cast of youths-on-the-dole and their attempts to self-destruct, mainly via heroin. (“Ye see the misery ay the world as it is,” Welsh writes, “and ye cannae anaesthetise yirsel against it.”) The plot moves through the eyes of a handful of hooligans--Rents the smartass, Begbie the bully and Sick Boy the womanizer--as they try to make a quick buck (gambling, drug dealing, welfare fraud) so they can stuff their veins with liquid death, travel to London on holiday or, better, move far far away.

Despite its working-class milieu and high readability (if you can get through the Edinburgh street dialect), the novel employs the most sophisticated of literary techniques. Welsh uses point of view like a good club deejay slices from song to song: The narrator becomes each main character chapter by chapter and takes the reader into the most intimate corners of life--even the bathroom.

“I’m interested in the whole idea of physical writing,” Welsh says. “I think fiction is too cerebral.”

Welsh seems to play to the attention this all brings to him, becoming a chameleon of identities, shifting around like his own narrative.

He says he’s 37. The police in Glasgow, after arresting him recently for a little beer-inspired rowdiness, report he’s 44. One day he’s a working-class kid from the Edinburgh projects (“When you got out, you were aware you had a working-class accent,” he says. “I went to one of the crappy schools in the city.”) The next day we discover he holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

One day he is coy and reluctant about his drug history (“There was a time when I thought things were spinning out of control,” he says), the next he plays to the bad-boy writer role, partying hardy.

And while the structure behind “Trainspotting” is intricate, Welsh says his storytelling is rooted in his time writing reports as a work-a-day cog for the local government in Edinburgh.

“I didn’t have any formal training to write,” he says. “I was sort of an impostor, because so many people I know who are writers have gone to writers groups for years. I didn’t have any of that.”

His “Trainspotting” characters listen to post-punk music, have a punk sensibility and never once attend a modern, all-night rave party. But Welsh soaks up the connection some make between him and the new generation of rebellion in England that orbits around the dance music culture rooted in raving.

“What happened with the whole rave culture was people started to interact again and started talking to each other,” he says enthusiastically. “There are classless raves across all dimensions.”

“I think there is that same kind of idea of disaffected and excluded generation as there is in America,” he says, “but in Britain it’s really more centered around rave culture.”

“Trainspotting” rocked a British literati used to staid and self-referential writing. It has made Welsh the leader of a new school of grit-lit coming out of Scotland that is now seeping into the American consciousness, one step beyond of the brat pack of the ‘80s and early ‘90s (Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Douglas Coupland, et al.).

Rather than draw the scorn of the cultural elite in the way, say, Ellis’ graphic “American Psycho” did in 1990, critics have praised “Trainspotting,” extracting a de facto sense of morality from Welsh’s work. “What impresses most about the story [and indeed all of Welsh’s work] is its fierce, uncompromising morality,” writes Jonathan Coe in the Sunday Times of London. “Nothing his characters do is ever without its consequence.”

Perhaps “Trainspotting” is at its most powerful when it portrays suffering in a matter-of-fact manner: “Johnny ran oot ay veins and started shooting intae his arteries. It only took a few ay they shots tae gie um gangrine. Then the leg hud tae go . . . ‘Ah thoat whin ah saw the stump thit it wis an opportunity, another access point, but the hoespital [nurse] sais: Forget it.’ ”

While no one would want to run out and try heroin for the first time after reading this 349-page tome, published in Britain in 1993, Welsh himself says his writing reserves judgment. His similarly flavored body of work includes “Ecstasy” (due here in October), “Maribou Stork Nightmares” (which generally received lower marks) and “The Acid House,” a collection of short stories with even wilder points of view (in one story, lightning strikes and prompts a baby and an invalid to change places with surreal, comical results).

“I don’t see drug use as a moral issue,” he says. “I see it as a social issue. I would genuinely like to see a time of a drug-free society. But that would mean having a lot of social and psychological needs met. That’s a long way off.”

Welsh, in fact, is concerned that kids are reading “Trainspotting” and wrongly getting a glamorous take on drugs. “It does concern me a wee bit that kids are passing around the book as a cult book,” he says, “taking the hipness out of it without having a broader perspective.”

Indeed, Welsh’s work, like that of his Scottish peers, is very youth-culture- and class-conscious. “In Britain there is a tradition that you have to be schooled in the classics and read everything and all your references have to come from that,” he says. “I think it should be about culture and real things instead of taking your references from a stagnant pool.”

Now, to get the Welsh flavor, his fans don’t really have to read books. They can see “Trainspotting,” the movie. Or they can wait for Welsh’s next work: “Ibiza!”--a straight-to-film work named for the Spanish resort island that gave birth to the rave and other party scenes.

Adding to his repertoire of personae, Welsh is putting this one together himself.