SOURCE: “A Smart Cunt,” in Village Voice, Vol. 41, No. 30, July 23, 1996, p. 74.

In the following review, Lasdun discusses Trainspotting, The Acid House, and Marabou Stork Nightmares. Lasdun finds similarities between all three works, most notably in their examination of destructive impulses and the guilt that results.

Irvine Welsh is certainly the hottest and probably the best of a new, distinct, and talented generation of writers currently emerging in Britain. Richly demotic in idiom, totally at ease with popular culture, casually maudit, they’ve given both fiction and poetry (Glyn Maxwell, for example) a much needed shot in the arm, extending the reach of serious writing to parts of the population you’d have thought gave up on books decades ago. Welsh in particular seems to have every subculture in the U.K. at his feet right now—Ecstasy-popping ravers, goths, skinheads, and terminal dole-moles, not to mention most of...