Joey Shapiro's Reviews > 1982, Janine

I almost wrote this entire review in the Scottish dialect with the help of an online translator but I decided that would be annoying, so I dunno, count yer blessings that ye didnae hae tae read that!!! Choose life etc.

Just like with Alasdair Gray's previous/first book Lanark, which was about a book about working class Scottish boy feeling misery and regret and self-loathing that ended up being hopeful and sweet, so it is that this book about a working class Scottish adult feeling misery and regret and self-loathing is also ultimately deeply compassionate. The big pitch for the book in most of the reviews is that it's about PORN(!) but I think that is simply a dumb, very reductive reading. The main character Jock, whose internal monologue over the course of one long night we're reading for 330 pages, is narrating an elaborate erotic fantasy (less pornography than it is smutty pulp fiction) that gives him the only sense of power and control he has left in his life. He's hitting 50, he has a string of failed relationships and one failed marriage behind him, he abandoned his artistic passions from college to end up an alarm systems technician, and he can't stop fixating on the moments in his life in which he was impulsively cruel to others. In short, he feels like a human cockroach who isn't deserving of love and has been entirely deprived of it by the world around him. It's not a book about porn, it's a book about social/sexual/political powerlessness and crises of masculinity and alienation in the Modern Age!! And sometimes nipples! I loved this even more than Lanark because it felt hyperfocused on everything that made that book so special, which was the angst and loneliness and extremely Scottish kitchen-sink realism, and wasn't tied down by all the goofy fantasy novel interludes that Lanark had-- just good old-fashioned detailed descriptions of asses and depressing Scottish coming-of-age narratives. I've already written too much but I love it!!