REVIEW: The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

One of my favorite short stories of all time is Eurotrash by Irvine Welsh. And when I saw him at the Edinburgh Castle several years back and learned that he was moving to San Francisco to write his novel, I was thrilled. Irvine Welsh! With his gallows humor and Scottish dialect and black humor about young low-lifes, he brought new credibility to the stale San Francisco literary scene of the 826 Valencia group (writers no one will remember in 20 years like Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliott, Vendela Vida) and the Grotto's lit-chic for cerebral yuppies (Po Bronson, Ethan Canin, JT LeRoy).

Age doesn't suit all. Welsh's latest novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, is a self-conscious attempt by Welsh to mature, to deal with mortality, concepts of malehood, a decidedly post-nihilist, post-smack, post-Trainspotting novel. Welsh has "chosen life" as his beloved Renton would say. The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is about Skinner, a boozer looking for his lost father and frankly, a clue, and Kibby, a feeble male who is an afficionado of gaming mags like Game Informer. And Welsh's pinot noir novel, if you will, might have worked. If anyone with a modicum of editorial skill actually redlined the thing.

The book is asoak with verb tense problems and random shifts in POV, sometimes bouncing from first person to third person in the same person. The heart is there, but it's as if Welsh wrote this 500 page manuscript between trips to the loo during a pub crawl from the Edinburgh Castle to the Zeitgeist. The only saving grace of the book is that it appears Welsh has moved back to Dublin.