The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Busted Scotch: Selected Stories by James KelmanJames DeRossitt
James Kelman. Busted Scotch: Selected Stories. Norton, 1997. 264 pp. $23.00.
These are bleak, beautiful stories. James Kelman has a startling ability to wiggle into the skins of his characters—often angry, bitter, beaten, lost—and speak in their voices. Of the thirty-five stories collected here (ranging over more than twenty years of Kelman’s career), many take place on the tattered margins of Scottish society—pubs and betting parlors, parks and streetcorners. Sometimes they are peculiarly affecting because Kelman doesn’t really seem to be trying to tell a tale; he gives us a glimpse of a life through dialogue, an anecdote, a scene overheard on the street. These fragments of lives are as puzzling and pleasing, sad and amusing as if we’d stumbled upon them ourselves. Loneliness, lack of work and alcoholism give many of these characters an edge of despair. “No Longer the Warehouseman” is an almost perfect little story in the voice of a man who simply cannot stick with “gainful employment.” “The Paperbag” is typical of the stories in this volume: a man’s lonely meditation on a brief, humiliating encounter with a woman: “Why am I the most fucking boring bastard in the whole fucking world?” Really, these stories are too various and brilliant in such crazy ways that it is impossible to encapsulate this book’s many splendors in this tiny review. But the overall flavor of these stories is fairly represented by the narrator of “A Situation,” a man who has slept with his fiance’s sister. He is tormented by his deed but unable to admit it to her: “You take the way I live my life as an ordinary man; this is an average day and I’ve committed awful sins.” [James DeRossitt]