SOURCE: "Profane Wandering within the Idioms of Glasgow," in The New York Times, December 16, 1994, p. B8.

[In the following, Kakutani offers a negative appraisal of How Late It Was, How Late, lamenting Kelman's reliance on profanity and portrait of a passive character.]

How to describe James Kelman's new novel, How Late It Was, How Late? Think of one of Nathanael West's black comedies without the humor, combined with one of David Mamet's obscenity-laced plays without the poetry, combined with one of Samuel Beckett's novels without the philosophical subtext, and that should give you a pretty good idea of what this year's winner of the Booker Prize in Britain is like.

When the novel won that prestigious award this fall, there was an uproar in London, where detractors assailed the book's heavy use of profanity and its highly discursive narrative set down in Glaswegian slang.

As its critics claim...