Artists draw themselves drawing themselves. They sketch themselves sketching themselves (p. 81).

James Kelman’s God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena (2022) is a funny yet disturbing novel about survival, shame, and artistic integrity in a cultural system that values the performance (and internalisation) of bourgeois values and that celebrates writers who, as Kelman says, “fight for the right to conform”. At its heart is Jack Proctor, an award-winning writer who finds himself on yet another arts residency to pay the bills, forced to play the role of ‘writer’ as defined by middle-class liberal institutions. The novel often reads like a self-portrait, with Kelman’s own story woven tightly throughout the narrative, though it is, of course, only ever, to paraphrase Kelman, ‘a voice roughly similar to his own.’ What is constant, as ever, is that Kelman writes from below, in solidarity with those who refuse to assimilate: “the drinkers, failures, self-abusers, the untenured, unpromoted, those prone to emotional outbursts.” (p.342)

Yet Calum Barnes’ review in Tribune casts Proctor as ungrateful and petty, noting that “many of my writer friends would jump at the opportunity of a fellowship with paid readings.” Barnes claims that Proctor overlooks “economic barriers to writing that prevent new working-class [sic] writers from emerging,” focusing instead on “minor humiliations,” such as being introduced as a writer of Lallans Scots. “Jumping Jaysus! I don’t even know what that is!” says Proctor. What Barnes dismisses as “minor humiliations” are direct affronts to Proctor’s art, language and habitus—reminders that his work must align with middle-class expectations. If he won’t conform, they will misinterpret him and reduce his language to ‘Lallans’, a standardised system for imagining a national language that fails to embody actual ways of speaking or listening. The shocking thing is that a writer of all people should be viewed as petty for wishing to challenge or discuss how their own language is defined or labelled. The singer and songwriter Kendrick Lamar says that he speaks a language others think is an accent. His language—like Kelman’s—is rooted in place, class, and history. It can’t be nationalised or formalised or dismissed as just a peculiar way of speaking English. That analysis does away with different grammars and irregularities, rhythms of vocabulary, and even how the text is read and received. It also erases class, gender, race, place, everything about us that might shape how we speak. Imagine telling someone that the thing that is most central to their artform, their use of language, is a minor concern! Furthermore, the ‘opportunity of a fellowship’ prevents Proctor from finishing his novel, as he must leave his family and work to publicly perform an idea of an artist instead of doing what a writer must do: write. That Proctor—and major real-world artists—find ways to carve out space to write their culture and language is precisely because they resist such “minor humiliations.” Without that resistance, their work would be something else entirely. Kelman is known for challenging misreadings of his work and publicly acknowledges his wife as the main financial supporter of his writing. His refusal to internalise these ‘humiliations’ and instead to name them for what they are is part of what makes him one of the greatest of all storytellers of working-class lives.

While Barnes treats the economy, cultural capital and habitus as separate or hierarchical realms, Kelman’s novel shows how these spheres interact, forging violent ‘meritocracies’ and reproducing the norms that discipline and exploit working-class artists and readers alike. Indeed, Rastko Novaković, writing for Salvage magazine, describes the novel as revealing “the kind of exploitation artists face on a daily basis.” A 2022 report by the CREATe Centre at the University of Glasgow found that median author income had dropped to £7,000, with only 19% of writers earning solely from writing, down from 40% in 2006. The gender gap has widened, and black and multi-heritage authors earn 51% less than white authors. Authors increasingly rely on portfolio earnings—commissions, workshops, teaching, corporate writing. Proctor must lead workshops for money, though they leave him filled with dread. Other workers too must do things at work that they fundamentally disagree with or lose their ability to survive. Kelman explores the violence of this, the impact on your mental health, creativity and pocket––something rarely found in literature these days despite the work-related mental health epidemic we now face.

I would have found the company difficult (p. 89).

Kit de Waal notes how working-class writers are often asked by the art establishment: “How can we help you to be more like us?” This logic pervades all spheres where working-class people enter middle-class environs and are expected to perform their gratitude. One of my favourite vlogs, which I can no longer find online, shows a claimant responding to the question of whether he is “happy to do a job interview” for a wholly unsuitable job: “I’ll do the job interview,” he says, “but I’m not happy to do the interview.” For this refusal to do things happily, he is sanctioned. Throughout God’s Teeth, Proctor squirms under similar expectations—to be the grateful worker. At times, the novel feels vaudevillian, as though Proctor is bracing himself for the next performance to appease the crowd. What mask will he have to wear? What steps will he trip over? Will he forget his lines, remember to smile?

Proctor is rarely openly dismissed; instead, dismissal is painted through subtle flicks of Kelman’s brush. In a brilliant scene, he visits a school, explaining to students how an ‘adult artist’ might create a story. He teaches them how to create movement on the page—how spoken words might contradict body language to convey more than text alone. This device recurs throughout the novel, marking the quiet power struggle between Proctor and his supposed benefactors. At one arts event, an acquaintance asks:

You’re doing the residencies. You enjoy doing them?
I smiled
You don’t? Other writers seem to.
Seem to what?
Enjoy doing them, I suppose. (p.108)

The movement here is visceral—I found myself mimicking Proctor’s tight smile as I read. There’s something in how Kelman writes that takes you right there into the main character’s body so that you’re not reading, not speaking, but you’re right there at the point where thought becomes speech, you see the world through only their eyes. Elsewhere, the humour is slapstick, especially as we watch Proctor’s ageing working-class body stumble through bourgeois choreography. At one event, stuck with Jerry as he greets the literati, he awkwardly tries to mirror the group’s double-cheek kisses: “I kind of pecked at her, nearly nipping her ear, trying not to get too close then almost toppling.” (p. 110)

People laugh in the face of a sadistic tyrant. Otherwise they will cry (pp. 91–92).

Elsewhere, the humour fades and Proctor drifts toward madness. I wonder if phrases like “Heavenly gnashers batman” (p. 279), “God’s gnashers” (p. 93), or “God’s teeth”—outdated curse words—signal a deeper tension? They seem to hint at a pressure to conform or go mad, a joke only Proctor understands. Madness recurs as an existential threat: the pressure to perform, conform, survive. “They will not drive me mad. These Bastards,” he says, and he speaks of artists like Clare, Hölderlin, Hamsun, Strindberg—all rejected by the literary establishment (p. 103).

Hamsun’s Hunger explored a similar theme: the masks we wear to survive. His protagonist writes unpublishable treatises, raging against the world, living with integrity but in poverty. Middle-class culture demands silent submission; Proctor’s anger—and that of Hamsun’s anti-hero––threatens to rupture this. Kelman shows Proctor teetering between self-loathing and an existential need to stay angry. At one event, he leaves to avoid exploding: “If I hadn’t [left] I would have shamed myself” (p. 115). Shame—private, involuntary, corrosive—is the novel’s saddest refrain. Kelman writes in solidarity with those who resist the pantomime of creative professionalism but still need to “earn a crust” (p. 105). Proctor is repeatedly shamed, yet must return again and again to those who abuse him.

A workshop called Recounting Anecdotes (p.136)

Kelman manages the feat of creating characters that are at once universal and at the same time completely unique and specific. He builds character through action, rhythm, syntax, and voice––rarely through description, and yet his people and places are as finely drawn as though you were right there in amongst it all. Like studying a painting, the effect is hard to explain. Though Kelman’s writing often mirrors thought, Proctor himself reminds workshop participants that thought isn’t writing. Writing is what makes it onto the page, “[i]t’s to do with the composition, making the story” (p. 225). “What we do is shift things about not inside but outside in the material world; cut, copy and paste.” (p.135). Proctor critiques literary fashion where “it is de rigueur to remember such detail too precisely” (p. 106), as in critically-acclaimed novels like A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara which read like short stories thinly strung between columns of lifestyle journalism, pornographic in its attention to the detail of things and stuff. Kelman resists this curated realism. His craft lies in thought and language—movement, rhythm, and sound that build character and place, brushstroke by brushstroke. In a writing workshop, Proctor reminds students of William Carlos William’s advice that there is: “no idea but in things”, urging them to shape their work on the page rather than in their heads (p. 135). After winning the Booker for How Late it Was, How Late (1994) one judge asked Kelman whether he edited his work or if “it just came out.” “It jist comes oot, ah says.” Kelman later wrote, “It’s common to find well-meaning critics [approaching] the work as though it were an oral text […] They somehow assume it to be a literal transcription of recorded speech.”

Proctor reminds me of so many of the people I know and love, people who cannot submit, and just get on with it whether they are artists, academics, carers or tenants, benefit claimants, dog walkers, medically retired nurses, administrators, even––God’s teeth!––arts administrators. I watch my friends, (and myself) move between anger and fear, between depression and joy, or just getting by, getting on, feeling maybe they’re not doing as much as they should be, but they are. In the afterword, we discover that the whole book is a report, written at the request of the ‘House of Art and Aesthetics’. I wonder if Kelman addresses this report to the little arts administrators in our heads as well as to the bureaucrats themselves. After all, Proctor says that “if you are the one to read that book then its writer is writing to you” (p.342). It’s as though Kelman is entreating us to keep fighting, to keep “creating the terms” (and conditions) of our own life and art and culture, whether as readers or artists or both. As Proctor reminds us, if you do this, “[y]ou will not be alone”, you will find your accomplices:

Maybe they head departments. They might well do. People find their way. They disguise what they are, disguise what they do, and do it in their own time and you will find them, you can smell them out. Don’t be depressed. Be ordinary, just fucking fight. Ye’re used to fighting so fight. Of course it’s shite ye know it’s shite. (p.342)