Matt Thorne
The Mexicans Are Coming
If You Liked School You’ll Love Work
By Irvine Welsh
Jonathan Cape 320pp £11.99 order from our bookshop
‘Rattlesnakes’, the opening story in Irvine Welsh’s If You Liked School You’ll Love Work, his first collection since 1994’s The Acid House, is an extended dirty joke. Eugene, Scott and Madeline, three young Americans, are out in the desert after frying their brains at Nevada’s notorious Burning Man festival. Eugene is surreptitiously masturbating in their shared tent when a snake bites his penis. Eugene, who has lusted after Madeline for weeks, is desperate for her to suck the poison from his member, but she’s too scared of catching a disease. Scott offers to do it instead, but Eugene is reluctant, suddenly afraid that his friend is a closet homosexual. Realising he might die if he refuses, he gives in. Then the Mexicans show up.
No other literary author could get away with this sort of silly material. But when he’s operating at his best, Welsh’s narrative control is so expert that he can elevate anything, and ‘Rattlesnakes’ is scary, erotic and extremely funny. He performs a similar trick with the title story, which initially
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
You only have a week left to take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/