BUSTED SCOTCH: Selected Stories.<i> By James Kelman</i> .<i> W.W. Norton: 264 pp., $23</i>

Reading the 35 stories in James Kelman’s “Busted Scotch” is like entering a neighborhood bar for the first time. You don’t know the local characters, you’re not sure you like them and you can’t always understand their accents and dialects. Furthermore, they are so self-absorbed, you feel you simply don’t fit in.

But you keep returning, gradually accustoming yourself to the rhythms of their speech; to their manners, idiosyncrasies, wit and ironies. You listen to their stories, first with sympathy, then with empathy, and finally, when the bar closes, you’re reluctant to leave.

Kelman’s stories grow on you. They are subtle human concoctions in which speech itself and private preoccupations take precedent over plot and social or political message. Kelman, who won the Booker Prize in 1994 for his profanity-filled and sometimes nearly unintelligible novel, “How late it was, how late,” is a leader of a new generation of Scottish writers, who plumb lives in the lower echelon of society, and although he is heralded--and speaks of himself--as a voice for the underprivileged classes, this shouldn’t be mistaken as the true subject of his writing. While being regional and class-conscious, the work is really about basic issues of human nature.

Moreover, Kelman doesn’t burden his short fiction with punch lines or strained twists of plot, characteristic of the genre. Rather, he constructs content based on linguistic detail and psychological observation. In fact, language itself is an insistent subject and the characters--whatever their station--all speak a distinctive dialect, deftly used for absurd and comic effect. Punctuation, too, takes a position. Sometimes, Kelman drops the period at the end of a paragraph, a more subtle form of an ellipsis than an ellipsis itself.

The apparent realism of the stories in “Busted Scotch” is deceptive. Though based on character types, the pieces are not sociological studies but formidable works of the imagination, so intense they sometimes border on the surreal.

As with Samuel Beckett, Kelman uses psyche and words to drive narrative, and like Beckett’s characters, Kelman’s dwell obsessively on their physical functions and feelings. But unlike Beckett, Kelman lets his characters catch themselves in the act. “I am fed up with being fed up,” says one, observing coolly. “Obviously I am just in the middle of a nervous breakdown, even saying I mean that alone”

These thoughts emerge in one of the collection’s finest pieces, “Not Not While the Giro,” in which the chronically unemployed “hero” living off the state and off the apparent kindness of neighbors, whom he of course resents, has time to reflect only on himself. “Often I sit by the window in order to sort myself out--a group therapy within, and I am content with a behaviorist approach. . . . I quick-fire trip questions at myself which demand immediate answers and sometimes elongated thought-out ones. So far I have been unsuccessful. . . .” He considers how he could educate himself enough to get into a minor university and train as a psychologist but argues minutely the pros and cons of such a project, with the cons, naturally, triumphing.

He keeps eloquent measure of his psychological and philosophical stance vis-a-vis life. “According to the mirror I have been going about with a thoughtful expression on one’s countenance. I appear to have become aware of myself in relation to this field by which I mean the external world. In relation to this field I am in full knowledge of my position. And this has nothing to do with steak & chips.”

Kelman’s generally sad characters suffer their failures, deficiencies and poor behavior first by looking for someone to blame, then by exploring the potential of self-justification and finally by turning their accusations inward. At that point, it’s not guilt they feel but resignation, a peculiar form of self-acceptance, which translates finally into “I am what I am.”

In the wry, moving story “A Situation,” a man has just slept with his fiancee’s sister. His initial rationalization goes this way: The fiancee “had refused the first proposal and he was not giving her a second chance, arrogant vain bastard that he was. . . . But it was her own fault. . . . He had tried to persuade her but she was resolute. So how could it be him to blame? It couldnt. It wasnt his fault at all, if he had proposed and she had deposed, deponed, said no,

“Yes it was. . . . he was to blame, for the transgression in question.”

And they cope. In the story ironically titled “He Knew Him Well,” some men reminisce at a pub about an elderly “friend” who was found dead with his wrists slashed. As they talk, they acknowledge that they never really did know him. They begin to distance themselves. Then, in an effort to explain the event, one remarks, “The doctor, he said old Dennis couldn’t have been eating for nearly a week beforehand.”

“‘Bloody fool,’ he sighed. ‘He should’ve ate.’ ” Obviously, he had only himself to blame.

They also amuse themselves. In “Roofsliding,” Kelman prints, as he says, “more or less verbatim” instructions culled from a pamphlet “Within Our City Slums.” Truth here is as peculiar as fiction. The absurd and absurdly sensible unite in the painstaking description of the proper way for a group of people to slide off the roof of a three-story tenement building. “When the feet come to rest on the gutter, roofsliding halts at once and the order in which members finish plays no part in the practice.”

Kelman owes much to Henry James stylistically. The sheer fascination with words in themselves and the way they can build up suspense from sentence to sentence, with no need for anything to actually happen, is downright Jamesian. Although we know the suspense may be false, it frees the writer, the character and the reader from pinning their expectations on it and increases the importance of every detail.

Kelman introduces “Busted Scotch” with a letter to his editor in which he succinctly traces his creative ancestry. “It was from an admixture of two literary traditions, the European Existential and the American Realist, allied to British rock music (influenced directly from blues music, with an input from country and western), that I reached the age of twenty-two in the knowledge that certain rights were mine.”

For Kelman, words are democratic. The freedom to use and twist them is a right that transcends class and intellectual status. It is the characters’ prerogative to use, distort and even abuse them as they see fit. At least they have that.

In the opening of his 1989 novel, “Disaffection,” Kelman describes his protagonist’s style as if he were describing his own. “If anything his secret hankering was to be a painter, doing fairly large murals. He could imagine covering the gable ends of tenement buildings, or even better the interior walls of tenement closes, inserting various nooks and crannies and twists and corners; evil shapes and sinister figures--different things: but always inclining toward Goya’s work of the black period.”

That’s how Kelman explores his world and probes the mind, from the inside out, uncovering psychic nooks and crannies. In this way, the effect of his works is cumulative, insights and emotions piled one atop the other. That’s why the stories, even though they were written over the last two decades, hang together easily. Because they are bound naturally by character, incident and language, there is no limit to what they can accommodate. There’s always room for someone new at the bar.