Irvine Welsh’s ‘The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins’

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Put down the novel and back away from the doughnuts. It is not advisable to read Irvine Welsh’s 13th book, “The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins,” and snack simultaneously. Because Welsh, known for his gleeful depictions of the depraved degenerates who populate Scotland’s seediest hollows, has turned his attention to one of his adopted homes, Miami Beach, that “sun-drenched refuge for strutting grotesques and desperate narcissists.” This is not Welsh’s first Rollerblade around Florida; “Crime” followed a coke-addled Edinburgh detective along the same bright sidewalks. It is, however, his first to be narrated by two Americans. And not just any two Americans. Female ones. This is a man who once successfully narrated a portion of a novel from the point of view of a tapeworm. The question is, in assuming the perspectives of women, has he bitten off more than he can chew?

We do not so much meet Lucy Brennan, a bisexual 33-year-old fitness trainer with “snake-swallows-football calves,” as we are mowed over by her. She disarms a crazed gunman on a nearly deserted ­Miami causeway, hopping out of her car and holding him down as his targets scatter. Meanwhile, the 200-pound Lena ­Sorenson (her weight is “a crime against the aesthetic order in South Beach”) is the sole witness to this scene, which she captures on her phone. When she shares the footage with a local news station, Lucy is painted as a hero. Lena signs up to train with Lucy, whose abhorrence of humanity runs deep (“I just wanna punch out every time-wasting bum I see”). When Lena says she wants some of that determination, Lucy replies, “Yes, but you aren’t a vampire and I’m not a blood bank.”

Thus begins an outlandish tangle of events, in which each woman becomes the object of the other’s obsession. Soon it’s Lucy who is spying on Lena from outside her home as Lena stuffs her face and peruses a website called Cute Overload. It’s Lucy who starts to unravel, personally and professionally, as she schemes to “control” Lena once and for all.

Lena gets an opportunity to tell her story eventually (she’s a formerly svelte sculpture prodigy — both women are “in the molding business”), but it’s Lucy who hijacks the narration. She’s a classic Welshian sadist dressed in a woman suit (replace the narcotics with protein powder). She hails from America’s version of Leith, Edinburgh: Southie. Her energetic, expletive-laced rants are 99 percent ­unquotable here, yet she displays bursts of a vocabulary she shouldn’t possess (“Bitch might shed pounds but bitch’s soul’s still corpulent”). In fact, she is so profoundly unpleasant that something surprising happens — Lucy bypasses the accusations of “unlikability” so often leveled at female narrators. Not having to hold this psychopath to standards of realism becomes a perverse relief in itself.

Unfortunately, Welsh then gives both women histories of emotional trauma and sexual abuse. The sincerity of these tales is so out of place, they are more offensive than the satire. Also mentioned throughout — streaming from flat-screens at the gym — is the news story about a pair of conjoined twins in Arkansas who are ­debating de-conjoining. “All America is enthralled by the so-called morality issue, which really is a degenerate’s wet dream.” The symbolism of American grotesqueness and the parallel with our heroines is superfluous. Because if you wade through the blood, the “sperm-thick sweat” and the excrement (or wallow in it like a true Welsh fan), the book is compelling — even ingenious — on its own. Then this sensationalist device comes along to conk you over the head every few ­chapters.

By the end, it’s clear Welsh has no real interest in exploring the complex relationships between women. Which wouldn’t be an issue if women themselves — even the toughest, strap-on-brandishing divas — weren’t so interested. The novel may feel tonally out of touch to people who know the conversation about sex and gender in America has either increased in nuance or moved on. To which this darkly bizarre book might respond: Since when is this a conversation? Now drop and give me 50, you cellulite-spackled loser.