Irvine Welsh's first all-American novel is a queasy sex comedy that pokes fun at media culture
Irvine Welsh: on 'full-throatedly yucky' form. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Observer
Although it's as full-throatedly yucky as you'd expect from an Irvine Welsh novel – even the sweat here is "sperm-thick" – this knockabout caper of Miami vice is in several respects a departure. While not the first novel Welsh has set in his adopted home of the United States, it's the first with an all-American cast, and the first narrated entirely from the point of view of its female characters. And the heroine is a fitness freak who won't even touch coffee let alone anything stronger.
As in The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006), Welsh builds the story around an encounter between two characters with more in common than it at first seems. Foul-mouthed personal trainer Lucy likes rough sex with girls and guys snared in meat-market nightspots. Avant garde sculptor Lena battles her weight and low self-esteem in the wake of her ill treatment by a manipulative ex-boyfriend. They cross paths at the scene of a thwarted carjacking when Lucy uses her kickboxing moves to disarm a gunman whose prey escapes into the night. iPhone footage caught by the onlooking Lena makes Lucy an insta-celeb touted for a TV gig as the taskmistress on a weight-loss reality show.
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As in The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006), Welsh builds the story around an encounter between two characters with more in common than it at first seems. Foul-mouthed personal trainer Lucy likes rough sex with girls and guys snared in meat-market nightspots. Avant garde sculptor Lena battles her weight and low self-esteem in the wake of her ill treatment by a manipulative ex-boyfriend. They cross paths at the scene of a thwarted carjacking when Lucy uses her kickboxing moves to disarm a gunman whose prey escapes into the night. iPhone footage caught by the onlooking Lena makes Lucy an insta-celeb touted for a TV gig as the taskmistress on a weight-loss reality show.More
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