GOOD TIMES - Hardcover

James Kelman is an author, editor, and essayist born in Glasgow in 1946. His 1989 novel, A Disaffection, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, which he had previously won in 1994 for How Late It Was, How Late. He won the Book of the Year Awards from the Scottish Arts Council and the Saltire Society for Kieron Smith, Boy. He was also short-listed for a 2016 Saltire Society Award for his novel, Dirt Road.

The edgy, eerily precise worldview reflected in Kelman's Booker Prizewinning How late it was, how late, and other work, most recently Busted Scotch (1997), remains grim and brilliantly undimmed in this group of 20 tales. Kelman's stories feature the Scottish working class, in which miscues are common and evidence of real understandingof oneself or of othersis rare. In the opening situation, ``Joe laughed,'' a young daredevil, roof climber, and soccer player without peer ruminates on a friend's recent betrayal while hanging with his arms hooked on a window in a crumbling dockland building, overlooking a particularly dangerous roof pitch. The theme of existential disconnect continues in stories such as ``pulped sandwiches,'' where idle lunchtime conversation between construction workers touches on the topic of death and triggers in one a blind rage. In ``I was asking a question too,'' a man fond of copying words of wisdom from books he reads, sticking them up all over his apartment walls, considers his inability to talk with his single neighbor or anyone else. ``Every fucking time'' takes place in a pub, where a middle-aged man waits to rendezvous with his wife, with barely enough money to buy himself a drink, while engaging in a conversation he despises with two brothers he's known almost all his life; his wife never shows, leaving him to act alone. ``Comic cuts,'' the longest story, offers some hope that not all communication is misdirected: two men conspire to bamboozle a third with abstract discourse after a hard night, while they wait in the wee hours of a winter morning for some soup to heat and their mate to wake from his slumber on the kitchen floorbut the soup never appears. The brief title piece, based on a nightmare, serves as a fitting finale. Bleak, almost surreal stuff, sure enough, but every fragmented encounter or stark monologue here contains a nugget of hard-earned, bitter truth. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.