Fay Weldon is a perspicacious, compelling storyteller who makes you laugh — and weep — for the malice and ill-will we mortals hurl at each other in the name of love.
Fay Weldon was born in Worcestershire, brought up in New Zealand, and lives in London. She is a novelist, TV, radio and stage dramatist, journalist and commentator. Among her novels are Praxis (1979) and The Life and Loves of A She-Devil (1986).
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
Irvine Welsh 1958–
1993 Trainspotting
‘Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonized by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonized by. No. We are ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth.’ Meet Mark Renton — Scottish heroin junkie, fan of Hibs United, hopeless shoplifter, Iggy Pop fiend, and the hero of Irvine Welsh’s explosive and hilarious novel.
Set among Edinburgh’s troubled housing estates, Trainspotting brings a whole new world into the novel, a new kind of person, a low-life humour and demotic energy. These are mostly characters who have never known work, who defy the materialist ethos of 1980s Britain, and who embrace music, drink and drugs as the only truth in a nation of lies.
Though Welsh owes something to Burroughs and Ballard, and to his late compatriot Alexander Trocchi, he draws much more from popular culture, punk rock and the rave scene. The episodic rush of Trainspotting is remarkable because of the way it deals with class politics and for the power and range of its voice. It is interesting also because it offers a breathtakingly vivid picture of lives that are never written about. The world of Trainspotting is not a charming Scotland of castles and Bravehearts; it is a place of new sicknesses. As Renton says of an old auntie who falls in love with Romantic Edinburgh: ‘Instead ay a view ay the castle she’d goat a view ay the gasworks. That’s how it fuckin works in real life, if ye urnae a rich cunt wi a big fuckin hoose n plenty poppy.’
Irvine Welsh was born in Edinburgh and now lives in London. His other books include The Acid House (1994), Ecstasy (1996), Filth (1998), Glue (2001), Porno (2003) and Crime (2008). Trainspotting was filmed in 1996.
Age in year of publication: thirty-five.
Eudora Welty 1909–2006
1972 The Optimist’s Daughter
Eudora Welty is a writer who has listened closely all her life. Living in Mississippi, her language merits recording — the singing, teasing English of the South.
She is the alert observer of small communities of people, families, everyday things. There is a Welty miasma, an atmosphere in which wildly comic words and vigorous behaviour scuffle with a sense of loss, failure or grieving. Thus, minor incidents take on major significance, and this is exactly so in this account of Laurel’s return home for the illness and death of her father, Judge McKelva. Born optimist, ‘fairest, most impartial, sweetest man’, after the early death of Laurel’s mother Becky — beloved Becky — he has married the young and malign vulgarian Wanda May, a vixen on green high heels. Every neighbour and friend comes to greet Laurel, and each object in the old family home comes alive for her return: the sewing machine, the gooseneck lamp, cupboards ‘with the earnest smell of mouse’.
Welty’s theme is memory, the confusion of life and the comedy of love, love of all kinds: the friends and neighbours at the funeral are a melodic Mississippian Greek chorus to Laurel’s recollections. Eudora Welty is a southern magician, a mistress of words that tell us the meaning and value of the things and people we live among, and of the past.
Eudora Welty was born and lived in Jackson, Mississippi, and wrote five novels and many short stories. This partially autobiographical novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
Age in year of publication: sixty-three.
Rebecca West 1892–1983
1957 The Fountain Overflows
Everything Rebecca West did, and wrote, had determination about it. This novel has the intense charm of a classic Edwardian novel recounted in the expressive prose of that time, yet it was written in the 1950s.
Rose Aubrey tells the story of her childhood. She lives with her parents, brother and two sisters in South London, in the sort of poverty associated with wayward and improvident fathers. This adored man, Piers, is given to gambling and speculation, whilst security of some kind is provided by Rose’s artistic, serious mother, so that some of what we associate with such childhoods is still there: the hearths, the gaslight, the walks, the teas, and most of all the music — for the love of music and the talent to make it is the only deliverance the girls can hope for.
Much of the novel is autobiographical. Rebecca West was Rose Aubrey, and the power of the novel comes from her resolute belief in the way things were. Into her portrait of Piers Aubrey, her father, she pours dreams of worship: ‘Our Papa was far handsomer than anybody else’s … he stood like a fencer in a picture …’ These long-remembered cries are like ghosts in the novel giving it the keenness of a lament — for a family life that could have been, for the artistic aspirations that, instead, made life worth living.
Rebecca West was born in London of a Scottish mother and Irish father. She lived in London and was a celebrated journalist, novelist, political commentator and critic. Her classic study of the Balkans, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon was published in 1942.
Age in year of publication: sixty-five.
Edmund White 1940–
1982 A Boy’s Own Story
Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story tells the story of an unnamed American white boy growing up gay in the 1950s. It is a careful and close examination of an effort to invent an identity. Nothing is taken for granted. His parents seem distant and strange even before their divorce, and after the divorce they emerge as capricious and irrational, as does the boy’s sister. He is alone with his sexuality. He wants, and the sense of his desire in the book is overwhelming, to sleep with a man, an older man, a younger man, any man, just as he wants to escape from home. But he does not want to deal with the implications of any of this and this makes his story complex and fascinating. He does not want to become the narrator of The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) or The Farewell Symphony (1997), White’s two novels which deal with our hero as a young gay man on the rampage and an older man in the age of AIDS. The sense of honesty in the book is matched by the writing, which is wonderfully dense and sharp at the same time; White understands, as almost no one before him did, how perfect the novel form is for a dramatization of gay identity, how a gay character’s search in a hostile environment for recognition and completion remains, for the moment, intrinsically interesting and tense.
Edmund White was born in Ohio in 1940, and lived in Paris for many years. He has now returned to the United States. His other books include States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), Genet: A Biography (1993), The Married Man (2000), Fanny: A Fiction (2003) and Rimbaud (2008).