WHEN Irvine Welsh talks about doing "gigs" to promote his new book, you know we're only one Sunday supplement feature away from literature being declared the new rock n roll. Following on from the success of Welsh's Trainspotting novel - which is both the fastest selling and the most shoplifted novel in recent publishing history - a whole new clatter of punk lit writers are beginning to look back in anger again.
Say goodbye Britpop and hello Britlit. HMV's loss is Waterstone's gain as a new demoraphic group begins to express more interest, and invest more income, in publishing houses than record companies. Now that the style magazines have decreed that literature is "a kinda cool thing to get into", authors who had previously bought a one way ticket to literary obscurity are now all the talk of this instant coffee society. Come on down Duncan McLean, Alan Warner and John King, your gravy train awaits.
As ephemeral as these trends: may seem, there is always some form of historic inevitability lurking beneath the hype. The original "Angry Young Men" of the mid 1950s - a lot of whom seemed to turn into Bitter Old Gits - like John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and Kingsley Amis, as strange as it may seem now, fought a literary war with the Leavisites of the day and upset convention ridden sensibilities. What was then talked about as "their rage against contemporary society" was little more than instilling their work with the sort of domestic realism that was previously deemed a bit too common for works of art.
Every movement needs a vanguard, and controversial Scottish writer Irvine Welsh is doing more "than his bit in being the first one over the trenches this time out. Welsh's raw prose, his high velocity writing style and his fixation with a drugged up culture (specifically smack) has ensured that his books are never out of the bestseller lists (charts?) and have made him, despite all the shoplifting, a millionaire. At a recent reading in Manchester, he elected to use the city's famous/infamous (depending on your age) Hacienda Club - a venue more associated with staging dance events. Despite, or maybe because of his uncharacteristic choice of venues, Welsh attracts more people to his readings than Seamus Heaney.
When James Kelman won a Booker prize for the expletive ridden How Late It Was, How Late, it did seem that a more "casual" form of language use was being officially sanctioned. While arguments blather on about "artistic merit" there is no doubting the commercial success of the new breed. Alan Warner (32), who is very much in the "in yer face" mould of Welsh, has just won the Somerset Maugham award for the best young novelist and his first book, Murvern Callar, has sold 10,000 copies in its first week of publication.
Andy Miller, who promotes Waterstone's readings, says his company has sold more novels in the first six months of this year than at any other time. The reasons are clear: "There is a definite shift in the marketplace," he says. "A new group of readers is emerging and they are in their 20s. Until about two years ago their bedroom shelves were full of CDs but now there are books too. Not Austen, or Dickens or even some modern writers who have been touted as the best of young British. They are choosing books by people like Irvine Welsh. A new kind of British writer has created a new audience. It's unique and unprecedented."
It might also have something to do with the allegation that Irvine Welsh has done to heroin what Nick Hornby did to football - wrapped it up in a nice literary package for the delectation of the middle classes.
You know its getting serious when you consider that one of the "biggest selling books this year so far in the US is by a man described as "the Kurt Cobain of Letters". David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (published this side of the Atlantic on Monday) is unique - in the genre in that it has merged both critical and commercial acclaim. New York magazine said that "next year's book awards have been decided, Foster Wallace has already obliterated the competition" while the New York Times described Infinite Jest as "a Gravity's Rainbow or Naked Lunch for the 90s" and went on to describe Wallace as "a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything".
Wallace's lengthy novel (1,079 pages if you're tough enough) is structured more along the lines of a CD-Rom than a conventional novel plots and sub plots go walk about, time goes forward and back in a seemingly arbitrary manner and there is as much contemporary satire as there is dark apocalyptic narrative. Already labelled the "great grunge American novel", reviewers are quick to point out that Wallace, like Irvine Welsh, is an ex junkie who has first hand experience of walking on the wild side. Although vastly different writers, both Wallace and Welsh seem to mourn a world (however obliquely) in which all traditional values have been discarded only to be replaced by the pursuit of self gratification (as in habitual drug use).
Helping along both Infinite Jest and Welsh's new book is clever marketing campaign that sells the author as much as the book. Both writers speak easily and readily of their flamboyant narcotic pasts and both come across more "rock n roll" than literary". It can't be too long before one or the other of them arrives on the stage of the Point and says "Hello Dublin, here's a short story from my new collection . . ."
