Kelman, James 1946-

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KELMAN, James 1946-

PERSONAL: Born June 9, 1946, in Glasgow, Scotland; married Marie Connors (a social worker), 1969; children: two daughters. Education: Attended University of Strathclyde, 1975-78, 1981-82.

ADDRESSES: Home—244 West Princess St., Glasgow G4 9DP, Scotland. Agent—Cathie Thomson, 23 Hill-head St., Glasgow G12, Scotland.

CAREER: Novelist and author of short fiction. Worked various semiskilled and laboring jobs. Scottish Arts Council writing fellowship, 1978-80, 1982-85.

AWARDS, HONORS: Scottish Arts Council bursary, 1973 and 1980, writing fellowship, 1978-80 and 1982-85, and book award, 1983, 1987, and 1989; Cheltenham Prize, 1987; James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1990, for A Disaffection; Booker Prize, and Writers' Guild Award, both 1994, both for How Late It Was, How Late; Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award, Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year designation, and Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award, all 1998, all for The Good Times; Booker Prize nomination, 2001, for Translated Accounts.

WRITINGS:

novels

The Busconductor Hines, Polygon Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1984.

A Chancer, Polygon Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1985.

A Disaffection, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1989.

How Late It Was, How Late, Norton (New York, NY), 1994.

Translated Accounts, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 2001.

You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2004.

short stories

An Old Pub near the Angel, Puckerbrush Press (Orono, ME), 1973.

(With Tom Leonard and Alex Hamilton) Three Glasgow Writers, Molendinar Press (Glasgow, Scotland), 1976.

Short Tales from the Nightshift, Print Studio Press (Glasgow, Scotland), 1978.

Not Not While the Giro and Other Stories, Polygon Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1983.

(With Alasdair Gray and Agnes Owens) Lean Tales, J. Cape (London, England), 1985.

Greyhound for Breakfast, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor) An East-End Anthology, Clydeside Press (Glasgow, Scotland), 1988.

The Burn, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1991.

Busted Scotch: Selected Stories, Norton (New York, NY), 1997.

Seven Stories (audiobook), AK Press (Stirling, Scotland), 1997.

The Good Times, Random House (New York, NY), 1999.

plays

Hardie and Baird: The Last Days (radio play broadcast 1978; stage play produced in Edinburgh, 1990), Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1991.

The Busker, produced in Edingurgh, 1985.

Le Rodeur (adaptation of a play by Enzo Cormann), produced in Edinburgh, 1987.

In the Night, produced in Stirling, Scotland, 1988.

One Two-Hey (musical), produced 1994.

The Art of the Big Bass Drum (radio play), Radio 3, 1998.

other

Some Recent Attacks: Essays Clutural and Political, AK Press (Stirling, Scotland), 1992.

(With Benjamin Zephaniah) Inna Liverpool, AK Press (Stirling, Scotland), 1993.

Ten Guitars (short film), BBC Drama, 1995.

(With Ken Grant) The Close Season, Dewi Lewis (Stockport, England), 2002.

And the Judges Said … : Essays, Secker & Warburg, (London, England), 2002.

Also author of screenplay The Return, 1990.

ADAPTATIONS: How Late It Was, How Late was adapted for the stage by Kirk Lynn and produced in Austin, TX, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Scottish novelist and short-story writer James Kelman is the author of How Late It Was, How Late, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 1994. In Kelman's fiction the working class of Glasgow endure a bleak existence, living among urban decay and laboring at menial, unfulfilling jobs. Full of black humor, raw language, and Scottish dialect, Kelman's prose has earned the author a reputation as one of Great Britain's finest authors, while also frustrating those who want an easy read. Kelman, according to Times Literary Supplement contributor James Campbell, "conveys to the reader, as no other writer does, the feeling of Glasgow, the smell and sight and sound of pubs and betting shops, working-men's cafes, the texture of the streets."

Kelman's Not Not While the Giro and Other Stories contains twenty-six tales that employ the author's penchant for black humor; most also explore various social and economic aspects of the poor in London and Glasgow. As they cut corners to live from day to day, Kelman's ambitionless characters have little hope of rising above their dreary circumstances and are resigned to their lowly positions in life. The protagonist in the title story, for example, contemplates suicide, but dismisses the idea when he remembers his welfare check is soon to arrive. Other stories in the collection include "Away in Airdrie," about a boy's trip to a football game with his drunken uncle, and "The Block," in which a milkman is downed by a falling corpse. Writing in British Book News, reviewer Donald Campbell declared that "Kelman's ability to re-create" the squalor of contemporary urban Scotland "is a major achievement," and praised the author's "satisfying insight, an economic eye for detail and a telling accuracy in the evocation of atmosphere." Also applauding Not Not While the Giro was Gerald Mangan who, in the Times Literary Supplement, praised Kelman's "humour and pathos" and ability to keep "the prose readable as well as authentic. Speaking the same voice as his characters, yet avoiding all the pitfalls of condescension and nostalgia, he mines a rich ore from many unexplored seams of working-class life."

Kelman followed Not Not While the Giro with the novel The Busconductor Hines, a portrait of a bus conductor who hates his job, is bored with life, and dreams, without much hope, that things could be better one day. This first novel earned praise from several reviewers, among them Times Literary Supplement critic Edwin Morgan, who deemed it "an intelligent, exploratory, and sometimes very touching novel," and British Book News contributor Jim Miller, who stated: "With Kelman, and other writers such as Alasdair Gray, the great city of Glasgow and urban Scotland in general are finding the literary voices they deserve."

Kelman furthered his reputation as one of Scotland's most promising authors with the release of Greyhound for Breakfast, a book of forty-seven stories ranging in length from the eight-line "Leader from a Quality Newspaper" to the much longer title story about a despondent, unemployed man who spends his last eighty dollars on a dog. As he walks the dog around town, the man realizes how foolish he was to purchase the animal, which he cannot afford to feed. He also reflects on the misery in his life and pines for his son, who left without a word to find work in London. In Greyhound for Breakfast, as in his previous works, Kelman explores the psyche of Glasgow's down-andout. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani faulted the work, citing the author's "decidedly limited image bank—his inability to come up with more than half a dozen situations. By the time most readers have finished this volume," Kakutani opined, "they will never want to hear about another person bumming a cigarette, placing a bet or drinking a beer. They will feel nearly as suffocated as Mr. Kelman's characters do."

Other critics, however, applauded Greyhound for Breakfast, among them Arnold Weinstein, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Kelman has "rightly been dubbed the crown prince of the Scottish avant-garde." Weinstein also praised Kelman's "hilarious genius for detail, his casual social subtext, his unique refreshing burr that echoes the shivering slums." Similar comments were issued by William Grimes in his Voice Literary Supplement assessment of Greyhound for Breakfast. Grimes concluded his review with a plea to the book's publisher: "Memo to Roger Straus: Please, sir, can we have some more?"

The 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize was awarded to Kelman for his third novel, A Disaffection, the story of a week in the life of a Glaswegian school teacher. Overtaken with boredom and loneliness, Patrick Doyle is depressed by his elderly parents, at times burdened by his brother, and hopelessly infatuated with and sexually frustrated by a married colleague who flirts with him yet insists she wants no relationship. Caught in the gloom of Glasgow, Doyle finds comfort, oddly, in the tones he produces by blowing on a couple of industrial pipes he found discarded in an alley. As London Review of Books critic Karl Miller observed of the novel's protagonist: "For a man of twenty-nine he seems to have grabbed hold of very little of anything except a glass and a book. Drink figures in the novel, in precisely rendered scenes, as a bastion of the culture which is also a slow death. And yet this man is very far from useless. What we are reading is the Book of Patrick Doyle.…the portrait of an artist." Miller judged A Disaffection "pretty terrific, both truly challenging and nearly always very diverting." On the other hand, Times Literary Supplement reviewer Mangan found Doyle "the same restless and sardonic day-dreamer" featured in Kelman's earlier stories. A Disaffection, Mangan observed, "can be read as a fuller orchestration of its solipsistic lament." Although noting that Kelman has perfectly captured the sights and sounds of Glasgow in his writings, Mangan suggested: "It may be time for Kelman to direct his formidable capacities beyond this subject, and break new ground."

While some critics have advised Kelman to seek new subjects, others express admiration for his work and yearn for more. Times Literary Supplement contributor Angela McRobbie defended Kelman in a review of his story collection The Burn, writing: "He has been seen as a working-class writer working in the realist tradition, and this has prompted critics to complain that Kelman merely records what anyone could just as easily overhear in a Glasgow pub on any night of the week.…The realist label is a misunderstanding of Kelman's work, which takes aspects of working-class life as its raw material but which quickly moves inwards to explore a kind of psychic pain and paralysis." A London Times reviewer, discussing The Burn, also expressed appreciation for Kelman's tales: "Elegance in machinery, as in mathematics or storytelling, consists in employing the least means to the greatest effect, and so the first thing to be said about The Burn … is that it's a very elegant machine. As a writer, Kelman has the remarkable ability to synthesize deep emotion and routine behaviour." He reproduces the sources and consequences of so many people's stuckness in "civilized" society.

The 1994 Booker Prize was Kelman's reward for writing How Late It Was, How Late. In the novel Sammy goes on a drinking binge, wakes up beaten, shoeless, and blind in a police cell unable to recall how he got there, and stumbles home to discover his girlfriend has left him. Much of the story consists of Sammy's interior monologue, explained critic Andrew O'Hagan, who observed in the London Review of Books: "This stuff is close to perfect: Kelman identifies with characters like Sammy … and he can slip first-person perceptions and psychological tics into a third-person narrative in an astonishing way. For someone who's made such a palaver about ways of talking, about speech …, he's actually not so very good at dialogue.…It's the way people talk to themselves that he gets so brilliantly, so matchlessly."

After winning the Booker Prize, Kelman became the target of criticism due to the profusion of obscenities that appear in How Late It Was, How Late. In Kelman's defense, Richard Bausch wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "Objections to the language in which this good book is couched seem to me to be so far beside the point as to be rather ridiculous. How Late It Was, How Late is a book constructed out of the vernacular speech of a time and place, exactly as, once, Chaucer's tales were.…Itisa work of mar velous vibrance and richness of character [and] … deserves every accolade it gets."

Kelman addressed his use of profanity in the New York Times. "The dictionary would use the term 'debased,'" he told interviewer Sarah Lyall, referring to his dialogue as "living language." "In order to fight against the house style," the author continued, "you have to justify every single comma.…You have to revise and revise and proof at every bloody stage to insure that everything's spot on, especially because you're working in what other people regard as inconsistent ways, so you have to be really sure.…You have to trust the fact that you're a writer."

Busted Scotch: Selected Stories, published in 1997, is a collection of thirty-five short stories. Most of the characters are saddened or pained, and the stories follow them through private healing processes whereby they come to terms with their situations. Richard Burgin, in the New York Times Book Review, noted, "In addition to his vivid language and sense of comedy, [it] is the masterly internal monologues of his characters, which often lead them to surprising discoveries." Burgin added that Kelman "has fashioned a vision of the world so tormented and despairing that he has had to work hard to make it not only palatable but entertaining. His solution is twofold: exquisitely precise (although frequently obscene) language and a humor that is by turns dry, fanciful, slapstick and savage." Barbara A. MacAdam, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, likened reading Busted Scotch to entering an unfamiliar neighborhood bar full of un-known people with unknown stories: "You listen to their stories, first with sympathy, then with empathy, and finally, when the bar closes, you're reluctant to leave." MacAdam attributed her affinity for the stories to their universality, noting, "While being regional and class-conscious, the work is really about basic issues of human nature."

Salon contributor Todd Pruzan described Kelman's short-story collection The Good Times as not "a collection of twenty stories so much as a twenty fragments, twenty arguments, twenty interviews with hideous men. These aural folktales, seemingly overheard from the next table in the pub or through thin apartment walls, assume a participatory familiarity as Kelman isolates the throwaway thoughts and insignifica of our daily lives. We're conditioned to ignore our quotidian habits; Kelman stares them in the face." An Eye Weekly contributor mused over the fact that Kelman chose to follow his Booker-winning novel with a collection of short stories, opining that "Kelman always has a political bent, and is sometimes overly fond of big ideas—passages from novels or philosophy that free-float into some of the stories like intriguing but alien spores. But all is outshone by the writer's great gift—an ability to drive stories solely with emotion and character."

Critiquing Kelman's essay collection And the Judges Said …, Alan Marshall wrote in the London Daily Telegraph that the author focuses on "the scandal of exposure to asbestos on Clydeside, the destruction of the steel industry in Scotland, racism in Britain and the Turkish persecution of the Kurds. In writing about these issues in the angry, frank, straightforward way he does, Kelman is true to one of the beliefs that runs through the book: the confrontation with chronic specialisation, incapacitating expertise.… When an art ist addresses himself so artlessly to the world we live in, he reaches beyond his own specialisation: he lands in the street. The street is where the action is, where ordinary people live and come together." Kelman doesn't just write about such issues; he has also become personally involved: He has signed letters and raised money in support of a Kurdish writer imprisoned in Turkey, and taken part in public events, such as Writers against War on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. As Tim Conley noted for Modern-World: "Unlike CNN, Kelman has not abdicated his responsibility as a witness."

Reviewing Kelman's 2001 novel Translated Accounts, London Sunday Telegraph contributor Dave Robson remarked, "Giving voice to the inarticulate has become something of a crusade for James Kelman.…With Translated Accounts, he goes a stage further." While Robson experienced the book's intent as "an honourable ambition," the author's writing style "is so cumbersome, so unsuitable, so downright weird, that I would have to describe Translated Accounts …as the most unreadable novel I have ever had to wade my way through." London Sunday Times contributor Sean O'Brien held a different opinion however, writing that the novel "doesn't give an inch to simplification." "For one thing," O'Brien commented, "this is a political novel. It offers a set of fifty-four translations, by various administrative hands, of the testimony of an uncertain number of speakers following incidents during what appears to be a civil war in a police state. The translators' grasp of English idioms is not perfect.… Chronology is by no means certain: the past has ceased to be a resource and become an allegation." Finding parallels with the work of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and noting that reading the novel "requires a certain commitment," O'Brien nonetheless found Translated Accounts worth the effort: "There is considerable imaginative reward—a sense of having somehow seen the world with its labels taken off."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 58, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Hagemann, Susanne, editor, Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, Peter Lang (Frankfurt, Germany), 1996.

Lane, Richard J., Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew, editors, Contemporary British Fiction, Polity Press (Cambridge, England), 2003.

Mengham, Rod, editor, An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, Polity (Cambridge, England), 1999.

Wallace, Gavin, and Randall Stevenson, editors, The Scottish Novel since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1993.

periodicals

Austin American-Statesman, September 7, 2003. p. K2.

Booklist, May 1, 1997, p. 1480; June 1, 1999, p. 1790; September 15, 2001, p. 192.

British Book News, August, 1983, pp. 517-518; June, 1984, p. 365; November, 1985, pp. 684-685.

Bucknell Review, 2000, p. 150.

Christian Science Monitor, January 11, 1995, p. 13.

Contemporary Literature, winter, 2000, p. 693; spring, 2002, p. 50.

Daily Telegraph (London, England), June 9, 2001; April 13, 2002.

Economist (U.K.), April 26, 1997, p. 113.

English, summer, 1999, p. 101.

Evening Times (Glasgow, Scotland), July 24, 1998, p. 26; May 22, 2001, p. 2; March 11, 2002, p. 17; June 3, 2002, p. 3; November 21, 2002, p. 3; March 26, 2003, p. 15.

Financial Times, October 12, 1994, p. 12.

Guardian (London, England), July 18, 1998, pp. 10, 26; November 28, 1998, p. 16; October 30, 1999, p. 11; June 2, 2001, p. 6; July 25, 2001, p. 19; July 28, 2001, p. 8.

Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), March 1, 2001, p. 7; May 22, 2001, pp. 1, 3; May 23, 2001, p. 3; May 24, 2001, p. 19; June 1, 2001, 7 p. 6; June 2, 2001, p. 12; August 16, 2001, p. 7; April 6, 2002, p. 12; August 28, 2003, p. 5.

Independent (London, England), July 11, 1998, p. 16; July 18, 1998, p. 10; May 26, 2001, p. 10.

Independent on Sunday (London, England), July 19, 1998, p. 30; June 10, 2001, p. 51.

Insight on the News, January 23, 1995, p. 30.

Library Journal, April 15, 1989, p. 99; May 1, 1997, p. 142; July, 1999, p. 139; October 1, 2001, p. 141.

Listener, March 9, 1989, p. 31.

Literature and History, autumn, 1999, p. 44.

London Review of Books, May 2, 1985, pp. 22-23; April 2, 1987, p. 23; March 2, 1989, p. 13; May 26, 1994, p. 8.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 10, 1988, p. 11; April 6, 1995, p. E1; June 8, 1997, p. 13.

New Republic, December 8, 1997, p. 46.

New Statesman, May 24, 1985, p. 30; April 17, 1987, p. 30; May 10, 1991, p. 39; March 18, 1994, p. 56; June 11, 2001, p. 73.

Newsweek, January 23, 1995, p. 68.

New Yorker, January 9, 1995, p. 80.

New York Review of Books, April 25, 1991, pp. 12-18; June 8, 1995, p. 45.

New York Times, January 16, 1988, p. 16; October 12, 1994; November 29, 1994, pp. B1-B2; December 16, 1994, p. B8; October 16, 2003, p. E1.

New York Times Book Review, March 20, 1988, p. 19; June 18, 1989, p. 14; February 5, 1995, p. 8; May 18, 1997, p. 16; July 11, 1999, p. 22.

Observer (London, England), April 19, 1987, p. 22; November 15, 1987, p. 25; February 19, 1989, p. 44; February 4, 1990, p. 60; April 28, 1991, p. 59; March 27, 1994, p. 16; April 3, 1994, p. 19; July 19, 1998, p. 15; June 10, 2001, p. 15; October 20, 2002, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, December 25, 1987, p. 63; December 5, 1994, p. 68; April 21, 1997, p. 59; June 14, 1999, p. 49; September 10, 2001, p. 59.

Rain Taxi, fall, 1997.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 2000, p. 42.

San Francisco Chronicle, May 2, 1997, p. C2; July 13, 1997, p. 6.

Scotsman (Edinburgh, Scotland), February 23, 1998, p. 13; July 18, 1998, p. 16; July 24, 1998, p. 19; December 5, 1998, p. 17; September 27, 2000, p. 16; February 14, 2001, p. 9; June 1, 2001, p. 5; June 2, 2001, pp. 5, 10; August 23, 2001, p. 12; August 27, 2001, p. 7; April 27, 2002, p. 10; May 11, 2002, p. 8; May 19, 2003, p. 16; August 27, 2003, p. 16.

Scottish Literary Journal, spring, 2000, p. 105.

Spectator, April 2, 1994, p. 33; July 18, 1998, p. 34; June 9, 2001, p. 33.

Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), June 3, 2001, p. 10.

Sunday Telegraph (London, England), June 3, 2001.

Sunday Times (London, England), April 26, 1998, p. 3; July 12, 1998, p. 8; July 26, 1998, p. 2; June 3, 2001, p. 45; August 19, 2001, p. 13; April 14, 2002, p. 12; August 4, 2002, p. 44.

Swansea Review, 1994, p. 393.

Times (London, England), April 16, 1987, p. 397; May 2, 1991, p. 16; October 24, 1997, p. 19; July 16, 1998, p. 39; May 30, 2001, p. 9; May 1, 2002, p. 19; May 18, 2002, p. 16.

Times Literary Supplement, December 30, 1983, p. 1462; April 13, 1984, p. 397; May 10, 1985, p. 529; December 6, 1985, p. 1407; May 8, 1987, p. 488; February 24-March 2, 1989, p. 191; April 26, 1991, p. 18; January 1, 1993, p. 5; April 1, 1994, p. 20.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), January 1, 1995, p. 3.

Variant, August, 2000.

Voice Literary Supplement, February, 1988, p. 3.

Wall Street Journal, October 12, 1994, p. A15.

Washington Post, October 12, 1994, p. C1; November 25, 2001, p. T06.