Baedeker to the Scottish Soul : McX: A Romance of the Dour <i> By Todd McEwen (Grove Weidenfeld: $17.95; 192 pp.; 0-8021-1161-1)</i>

“McX: A Romance of the Dour” is a highly readable and argumentative narrative that stomps through its cast of characters and the insignificant events of their lives with vicious good humor. In this, his second novel, Todd McEwen has written a first-rate satire of the Scottish scene; simultaneously hilarious, savage, accurate and, I suspect, affectionate.

This novel of incidents and accidents piles triviality upon triviality, painting a wonderfully dour likeness of Scotland through a literary pointillism reminiscent of Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Here is a compressed conglomerate of puns, word plays and minutiae, as well as divers literary and historical references, taken from “all the rubbish of Scotland: crisp wrappers, beer tins, pilchard tins, torn tickets, swords, plaidies, broken bagpipes, whisky bottles, promises, armour, pockets o’ fogs, ships, covenants, discarded turrets,” illustrating that, as was once said on Monty Python: “No man who has free will would choose to be a Scotsman.”

The plot is as vestigial as Scotland itself. It revolves around McX, a short, hunched, rumpled procrastinator who is employed as a gauger with Her Majesty’s Weights and Measures. “But really he is just a thermal mass that which requires a job and breakfast.”

He lives on Allotment Street, on the edges of some town in psychologically suffocating Fife. “To place him in Dunfermline might be cruel, but like much of cruelty it might be true.” His spare hours are passed in the mausoleum-like Auld Licht pub, engaging in his hobbies of smoking cigarettes and drinking strong ale. He spends his holidays sequestered in his room reading travel magazines.

His life is one of ritual boredom until a fling in the Highlands with a lovely, sensitive woman, Siobhan, brings him happiness with its attendant guilt and insecurity. What more could a Scot desire?

Joining McX in the montage are: McPint, unrequited lecher and defender of propriety; Totemic Smith, iconoclastic artist whose paintings display the ultimate horror, truth; the master gauger, MacKenzie of the one-quarter-gill gullet; China Pig, artist’s model, “hoor” and woman of honor (a “china pig” is a ceramic hot-water bottle); His Lordship, whose title was received in recognition of success in “the business of getting folk drunk”; the libidinous restaurateur Balajiprasad, and sundry women on the road to becoming “little powdered lavender-watered” grannies.

These are people you’d meet on any street or in any pub of the kingdom, repressed by and obsessed with their miasmic environment, seen under the yellow glare of those Scottish sodium vapor street lamps that make all men resemble zombies.

Blindly they follow old national habits, instincts and traditions, as they impotently stumble down their personal predestined groove from the time they were just a gleam in Auld Hornie’s eye to their final home “down in hell, swaying back and forth, crying out, Forgive us, Lord, we didna ken. We didna ken.” Life is but prologue to damnation.

McEwen lays Puir Auld Scotland out on a slab, naked and bleeding, a pint in its hand and a fag between its lips, and autopsies its soul. Serious stuff and I couldn’t stop laughing. The man has a brilliant sense of comedy, not unlike that of Tom Sharpe.

“McX” is a kitchen midden of the Scottish psyche set in the perpetual fog and rain of Calvinism; a Grand Tour of the Scottish soul led by a faultless guide with an excellent ear for the local patter, a keen eye for the terrain and a sharp scalpel in hand. You’d never guess McEwen is an American, born near Los Angeles in 1953 and educated at Columbia University.

Some Scottish critics are not amused. To them, MacEwen is “This American . . . this outsider” who seems to have done for Scotland what Rushdie did for Islam. “McX” is the Caledonian equivalent of flag-burning. “Och, He disnae like us . . . He disnae like us.” Rabbie Burns’ desire--”Oh wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us!”--is not for them.

“What right . . . what right do ye have to come inside my head, to show the world what I’m thinking, to show the world what I’m like ,” says McPint to Totemic Smith. “You’ve sold us oot, aye, ye’ve shown everyone our weaknesses. The English, aye--.”

Aye, indeed. The worst fears are realized. O God! The English like the book! Another Culloden, another Flodden. . . . Once again the Scots fall through their own failings.

Those English are on target. “McX” is in a class with and spiritually akin to Hugh MacDiarmid’s great poem, “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.” “McX” is probably the best depiction of the modern Scottish character yet written. Here there’s more than enough to delight, and probably infuriate, anyone who loves Scotland or fine writing. As they say in Glasgow: “It’s pure deid brilliant!” ’Tis a pity most Scots will leave it unread. They’re the ones who’d profit most by the reading.