Margaret Thomson Davis's novels have centered on Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, a city that has tempted few novelists. That antiurban strain which can narrow the English novel may exert no comparable force on Scotland, but other Scottish writers have not found their own cities as persistently rewarding as she has. The case against Glasgow has been put most vehemently, as if the city can prove especially uncooperative when there is imaginative work to be done: the Glasgow painter and playwright Alasdair Grey, in his novel Lanark (1981), renamed his city "Unthank"; the poet Hugh MacDiarmuid raged, frequently and furiously, at what he saw as the city's "drivelling imbecilities," its contentment with the image of itself in the dull mirror of sociologists' commentaries, its positive glee in the reductive simplicities of "Auld Lang Syne" and pawky music-hall sentimentality, at what might be summarized as resistance to any imaginative transformation. Aware...