SOURCE: “Is it Ecstasy, or Existentialism?” in Insight on the News, September 16, 1996, pp. 34–5.

In the following review of Trainspotting and Ecstasy, Roberts argues that Welsh is to the 1990s what Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney were to the 1980s: chroniclers of empty drug-addicted lives.

In the mid-eighties we had Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis’ drug-steeped, alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated saga of disaffected youth set in Los Angeles, and Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney's East Coast version of the same. With attitudes that fluctuated between boastful self-regard and whiny self-loathing, Ellis and McInerney seemed to speak for a generation of Americans with time on their hands, money in their pockets and nothing on their minds.

Now we have Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh's drug-steeped, alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated saga of disaffected youth set in Edinburgh, Scotland. The characters are working-class rather than wealthy and their drug of choice is heroin rather than...