Men in Love
If this sounds like an updated Victorian melodrama, that’s because...it is at some level ... The difference here is the reductive perspective Welsh applies to all sides. His caricaturing can be very funny, shrewdly nailing the precise cultural, material and libidinal interests operating at any given moment, but it’s hard to care very much about which of his equally unlovable parties is going to end up in command of Cantley Lodge ... Trainspotting articulated the energies of an entire culture seething under the Thatcherite ice of 1980s Britain. Men in Love doesn’t aim so high.
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There are plenty of moments that showcase Welsh at his best, impertinent and loose and attuned to the poetic cadence of everyday speech. When his writing hits these heights, most often during flights of knowing, referential, rhetorical fancy, it is hard not to be charmed by its flair and insolence ... Elsewhere, Men in Love is tough going. Throughout, there is a tendency to grope for edgy and transgressive sentiment in a way that lands closer to juvenile and embarrassing ... Clocking in at well over 500 pages, there is also the sense that Men in Love could have done with a more rigorous edit.
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Tedious, lazy, pretentious and simply bad writing ... The heartbreaking thing is there’s a good novel to be written about the punk/smack generation of the early 1980s encountering the ecstasy love-buzz period as the decade progressed. But Welsh has signally failed to tackle any of that. He could have taken them to Ibiza, the Hacienda or Spike Island, or considered the achievements and failures of the Love Generation Mk II. But no. It’s another lazy retread.
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