Evident artistic care has been taken in the presentation. The impeccably crisp texts are set against papery beige or ecru backdrops. An occasional flower or drawing is thrown in, punctuating modestly the visual tone. The contents are agreeably formatted and there is an overall feeling of readability so rare in this world of drunken fonts. Texts in their original languages, translations, author's biographies, and other sections of the review are accessible by clicking a discrete menu which hovers at the top of each page. Back issues and their contents are organized for convenience in business-like columns. The emphasis is on younger authors of fiction, known and unknown, and the editorial taste is ecumenical. I'll confess ahead of time that my task, as a reviewer, has somewhat overwhelmed me, and I've found it prudent to limit myself to looking at four authors, who, to my mind contribute fabulous stories, and, when read together, demonstrate the range and intention of the review.

The twelve year old narrator of Routes uses a bus-trip into the Edinburgh night as a laboratory to examine his collapsed world, which he views with the dexterity of the already sacrificed.

I was attracted immediately to stories by Laura Hird and Irvine Welsh, the latter responsible for single-handedly filtering the so-called Scottish Renaissance through the "dropper" of mid-nineties heroin chic. James Kelman, the author who invented Glaswedgian as a literary language, is obviously the patron saint of this younger generation. While Kelman's work affects a species of sub-Bleaney aesthetic, grounded in mid-century irrevocability and wretchedness, these younger writers are definitely more millennial, post-closure. Their characters are literally crumbling into themselves, techno versions of Brueghel's bumbling blind. They operate in the realm of the non-event. Their lives are ruled by the fatality of the ancients, in the sense that they are locked into them. There is no question of escaping one's destiny. This, strangely enough does not lead to a sense of resignation, but almost to the reverse: a love of the bitter pill.

The characters in Laura Hird's story, Routes, seem to move about under the pall of what Braudillard in a 1996 Ctheory interview refers to as "precession," the idea that events no longer have the time to take place, that everything is known prior to the event, which is in turn reduced to the status of indicator, a disposable manifestation of media necessity. Characters in this situation are not moving towards a future. They are pinned to the narrative moment, like addicts-as William Burroughs once said-to the hour-glass of junk. The twelve year old narrator of Routes uses a bus-trip into the Edinburgh night as a laboratory to examine his collapsed world, which he views with the dexterity of the already sacrificed.

Irvine Welsh registers more abruptly, and with more fatality, on the Scots Richter Scale. His "Fault On the Line" is as funny as it is heart-rending.

As with poets of all ages, a certain suspicion of one's bus conductor prevails. Here he describes his modern Charon taking his coffee break mid-way through the loop. He's been forced to wait off the bus in an end of the world terminal.

Mr smart-arse keeps giving me smug wee smiles as he drinks
his lovely warm coffee out the lid of his flask and rams his
puss with Kit-Kats. As he opens up his paper I take out my
key and scrape National Kill a Bus Driver Day into the metal
inside the shelter. Hopefully one of the sheep-shaggers that
stay round here'll take it seriously and actually waste one of
the bastards.

Language itself, as in Clockwork Orange-though there's nothing consciously invented about the way this kid speaks-is a metaphor for the violence of it's ground. He employs the argot of his tribe, with an almost Rimbaldian degree of knowingness, as a tool, as an instrument of critique, and as an agent of individualization, and survival in a brute and stupid world. The bus-journey becomes a journey of articulation, a vehicle for brooding back, as it were, into the unrelenting horror of the present. The narrative mode, spinning on the present tense of the journey, emphasises the young boy's immediate and provisional focus, which is survival. His ability to describe things, and come, in his own fashion, to terms with them, is contrasted at various points with the muteness of others. His drugged, pregnant mother and her boyfriend, both of them permanently on the nod, are characterised by their very lack of language.

About once a year mum will speak, usually to get on her high
horse and accuse Scott of shagging other women, as if that
hackit puss could get anyone except her. Apart from that
though there isnae much talking roond oor hoose.

Irvine Welsh registers more abruptly, and with more fatality, on the Scots Richter Scale. His "Fault On the Line" is as funny as it is heart-rending. Funny because of the brutal nonchalance of the main character. Heart rending because the humor is informed by an emotional poverty so complete that is leaves one feeling a touch queasy. Of immediate interest though is the language, a decisively impenetrable Edinburghian which deflects the incremental horror of the story's gradual devolution into the murk of bathos. Each time we say "huh"? something of that horror slips by us. Each time we bear down to get a closer fix, the syntax pops out like a coiled spring and stabs out an eye. Husband, wife, and two "bairns" are let loose like some kind of sub-species into the relevant zoo. They excel at tragedy, almost as though it were their vocation, finding it in a simple trip to the pub. Irvine Welsh might as well be a doctor treating the criminally ill. Knowing he can not cure his patients, his turns his focus instead to the precise vocabularies by which they remain ignorant of their driving depravity.

The story begins with the first person narrator stressing ingenuously-a quality which, to our shocked amazement, he never quite loses-the conviction that what has happened was his wife's fault.

As far as it went wi me it wis aw her ain fuckin
fault. The cunts at the hoaspital basically agreed wi
ays n aw, no that they said as much in so many words,
bit ah could tell they did inside. Ye ken how
it is wi they cunts, they cannae jist come oot and
say what's oan thir fuckin mind like that.
Professional fuckin ettiquitte or whatever the fuck
they call it. Well seein as ah'm no a fuckin Doaktir
then, eh! Ah'd last aboot five fuckin minutes wi
they cunts, me. Ah'll gie yis fuckin bedside
manner, ya cunts.

Don't worry, there's no way that I'm going to tell you what does actually happen-it's simply too grim for paraphrase. Even to tell you how it might happen would go against the post-moral spirit of the tale. There are no lessons to be taken here; no amount of urban development, funds allocated, councel given, will redeem what is by now endemic. Welsh's fabulous gift is to still see the humor in it, and to get us there via the improbable gymnastics of the local idiom; that is, to find poetry still sprouting from the mouths of the dead!

But Ben Marcus is an American lapidary, a kind of bleached Dahlberg. His moral program is sublimated to craft, to the sentence faceted and planed.

Among other things, Irvine Welsh demonstrates how closely Ben Marcus is to writing pastiche. Welsh's raw vitality could-in a better world-serve as a corrective to the theory-bred among American experimentalists.

But Ben Marcus is an American lapidary, a kind of bleached Dahlberg. His moral program is sublimated to craft, to the sentence faceted and planed. He catches a Hopperesqe light in the very angularity of the prose. As so often in American idealism, a strange eloquence sustains the tunnelled vision of the exile. "Elevation of the Prison Bed", is a kind of later day captivity narrative. It reads something like A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich might have, had Ivan taken mescaline. The obsessively noting, skull-bound consciousness reflects over all manner of the immediate. This must suffice in lieu of a narrative, for the metrics of imprisonment have been internalized. The narrator will never escape from his own head, and thus the story will go, with great purpose, nowhere. This is the intention. Metaphorically, he is perhaps being punished for the sin of self-enclosure. As indolent as he is meticulous, he seems not to mind the static world. The first paragraph sets the tone:

It is of the prison I must speak, albeit, something seems
wrong. The wood is gone and the twigs are too damp
to burn. A cup of food rests on the stump. There has been a
shackle thrown clear of the grounds, as too some chain and
a wedge of prison documents. Does not the tower feel large
this morning? The shadow exaggerated? But perhaps the
gentleman will be led in from the rear this time, past the
young boy, thus the need for a wall to shield him. A
formation of gray-coated associates, no doubt, to
accompany his entrance.

The pace, the lack of background, the ominous ruse of the contingent, the missing subtext, situate us somewhere mid-range between Kafka and Beckett. The narrator while going nowhere is nevertheless going there urgently. Much as Beckett's Molloy feels compelled, for unknowable reasons, to write for the "man who comes every week", the unnamed narrator of Marcus' tale "must speak", even though something seems wrong. We're never told exactly what is wrong, but it feels ontological, a difficulty of rather abated Schopenhauerian proportions which is absorbed by notation, cataloguing, getting down what is in range, bracketing the knowable with the unknowable.

Despite the near eclipsing futility of the situation, there is the hidden morality. It is codified in something like craft, or care taken with the telling. The message seems to be that if there is no hope, there can still be pride, writerly pride, with its need to erect a reflecting surface-of lyrical beauty. Passages like the following, drifting, strangely as they do, in and out of metatext, are evidence of this story's hidden moral code.

To explain the pattering at dawn? A slight drumming or
the chatter? One cannot be too careful. The light swivels
north of the third prison container, which is constructed of
small bricks. I believe the women are housed there, for the
birds rush off the turret at noon and there is a moment each
day when the shadow is severe.

In Nicholas Royle's "Trussed", a copious triptych of a tale, we swing more towards the European mainstream of Kundera, or the cineaste Kieslowski. The story takes place in interiors: corridors of apartment buildings, basement mortuaries, through key holes-and mostly in the minds of three protagonists, each given their own panel-like section. The three panels are held in a cubist dynamic; their contents reflect, overlap and comment implicitly on each other, but are not deliberately connected in terms of the narrative. From what seems a prolix beginning, in the voice of a "part time worker" with a lot of time on his hands, we finally end up-in the reticent account of the embalmer pornographer Patrick-with the perfect arabesque of the dovetailed plot.

Royle's style is efficient and deliberately matte. There is none of the mandarin self-consciousness of Marcus' work, nor any of the barmy, declaiming, high slang which spouts from the marginalized mouths Welsh's characters. Workman-like, it is a style which is wholly at the service of revealing those little twists of innuendo and insight that contaminate the minds of ordinary people. His sentences are constructed to get us from A to B as efficiently and with as little fuss as possible. This has the effect of bringing mind and its conflicts that much closer, almost as though there were no style, per se, to intercede between the reader and the contents of the tale: a "writing degree zero" for the nineties perhaps. Here our partially employed character is delivering Christmas cards by hand, because he has the time to do so, and it saves him the postage.

There was no general letter box for the building, and
the glass doors could not be opened from the outside.
Nor could a card be slipped between the gap between
the doors, as a brass plate covered the join from the
top to the bottom. I stepped back on to the pavement,
the traffic roaring by just inches behind me. I
wondered how agreeable it might be to live so close to
such a large volume of cars, buses, lorries and
motorcycle couriers. This is the price you pay for
living in town.

Of course the sequence of events does not remain as thunderingly ordinary as this. But while it does, a certain comfort is taken at how well scenes of such perfect banality seem to lend themselves to the level of fiction. It takes a delicate touch, and a mature restraint to write with such convincing understatement and, indeed, ordinariness.

Eliot Weinberger, in a scalding little shrift entitled "Vomit" and published in Jacket #2, refers to "this Age of Proliferation", which he dates back to about thirty years ago, when the last novel to have a global impact, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, was published. According to Weinberger, one of the controlling paradoxes of our time is that information acts in an ascending ratio to limit communication, when it should be doing precisely the opposite. In short, the more there is to know, the less likely we are to know what anyone else knows. Even experts in the same field will have often failed to have read the same texts.

While Eliot Weinberger is certainly not Alan Bloom, nor even Harold, "Vomit" does show us-late as we are in the day-how the arguments of cultural critics on the left, and on the right, have begun to dovetail.

This looks at first to be a variation on the familiar Arnoldian argument: namely that the fragmentation of knowledge is death to the consensual basis of culture, without which works of genius-those works capable of creating the impact needed to shape their age-can not be produced. Arnold does have more obvious heirs than Eliot Weinberger, but those critics, mostly of the right, have misread him, if not in letter then in spirit. Housman informs us that Mathew Arnold was somewhat neglectful of the beer guzzling masses. Even so, he would have never entitled "Culture and Anarchy", for instance, "The Closing of The Victorian Mind."

While Eliot Weinberger is certainly not Alan Bloom, nor even Harold, "Vomit" does show us-late as we are in the day-how the arguments of cultural critics on the left, and on the right, have begun to dovetail. Both are posed against rampant consumerism, over-production, and the soul diminishing pitfalls of endless choice. Weinberger, unlike reactionary critics, does recognize that fragmentation into groups is one way to keep the consuming self human. But he sees there the danger of a "new provincialism".

In the general population, the feeling of helplessness amidst the multiplication of humanity and its products has, among other things, led to the creation of group identities, which are not only assertions of community and self in the collapsing of traditional societal units, but also a way, however inadvertent, to keep one's consumerism on a human scale....Intended - in their constructive aspects - to erase the worst forms of provincialism, group identities seek the refuge of a new provincialism in a cosmopolitanized world: a dream of an orderly and focused life, where one knows what one wants to discover and know.

What interests Weinberger is the way these groups use narrow-mindedness as a weapon. "Monolithic advocates of ethnic or sexual identities can happily concern themselves with the work of confederates and remain unashamedly oblivious of others." The artist, in her way, is capable of similar focus, and must fight the same enemy: "the multiplication of humanity and its products". To produce art "implies a conscious decision not to consume, if only momentarily - to arrogantly proclaim one's right or need to ceremoniously place one's tiny little leaf in this rain forest."

The cultist's "new provincialism" and "the assertions of community" are not, however, for everybody. The middle-class is, almost by definition, resistant to such solutions. Weinberger's bulimic cosmopolitans, locked into patterns of hyperconsumption, relieved only by bouts of guilty vomiting, are more apt to look for solutions in The New Yorker, on the Internet, or in therapy. Weinberger's conclusions are singularly bleak.

The rest of us can only stuff ourselves and vomit and stuff ourselves again. This is not the banquet vomiting of the Romans, which was a kind of potlatch: a demonstration of one's wealth or power through the greatest possible display of waste. This is a guilty vomiting, the vomiting of a bulimic, who may well be the emblem of the age.

What I find most trenchant in this marvellous description of postmodern contrition is precisely the manner in which the author diverges from the Arnoldian line. His critique of excess is not that excess thwarts tradition, but rather our "sense of the contemporary, of what is being produced right now." Distilled down to sound bites and flash in the pan products, mainstream culture has followed the commercial model to produce a renaissance of redundancy. It's actually designed to become lost in. According to Weinberger our inability to make sense out of our present predicament "is the one thing, beyond the gadgets, that is genuinely new."

This means, in the arts, that it is nearly impossible to have any impact. The first edition of The Waste Land was only five hundred copies, but it transformed poetry in various languages, and was known, whether adulated or rejected, by all readers of modern poetry. This has become unimaginable...

Weinberger's near terminal scepticism will be criticized from the right for offering no solution. From the left he'll be taken to hand for proffering the notion that "impact" was possible in the first place . . .

Weinberger's line might be that Arnold's "current of ideas", that combination of openness and cohesion so necessary for artistic production and a receptive public, has come "under siege by armies of production". Goethe, according to Arnold, simply bounced off an unreceptive 19th Century England, making "impact" impossible. Today's Goethe has proliferated beyond control, in the form of new editions, commentaries, doctoral theses, Hollywood versions, lyrically earnest documentaries from the BBC-Goethe has become a species of Weimarian furniture. Impact is impossible because Goethe, the commodity, the cultural marker, has rendered Goethe's poetry redundant. Weinberger complains that his local video store holds ten thousand films. I've just plugged Goethe into Hotbot and turned up forty-nine thousand, three hundred and seventy-three matches.

Weinberger's near terminal scepticism will be criticized from the right for offering no solution. From the left he'll be taken to hand for proffering the notion that "impact" was possible in the first place, that it was ever anything other than a totalizing ruse invented by an age of criticism more interested in canonization than inclusion of diversity. And yet by alienating everyone, much as Arnold did in his day, he has carved out for himself a privileged niche. By liberating himself from the moral programs of the right, and the theoretical ones of the left, he is able to see clearly the function of art in society and measure it against public discourse in general. That, in the end, is how it must be measured, and where it must function, if it is to live into the next century, on the Net, in books, or even in your neighbor's mouth.

Martin Walter Earl

Martin Earl lives with his wife Luísa in Coimbra, a small city about two hundred kilometers north of Lisbon. He was raised in Duxbury Massachusetts and lived in New York City during the early eighties before moving to Paris in 1984. In 1986 he left Paris to live in Portugal, and has been there ever since. His book, Stundenglas, was published in 1992 in East Berlin by Edition Maldoror. His poems have been published in magazines in America and the U.K. Some of these include Conjunctions, The Iowa review, Denver Quarterly, Metre (U.K.) and PN Review (U.K.). His work has been translated into French, German, Portugese, and Swedish.