SOURCE: A review of The Acid House, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 3, Summer, 1997, p. 401.

In the following review of The Acid House, Bush examines Welsh's use of dialect and jargon, finding such language rhythmic and poetic.

A shorter Welsh lexicon to begin: nowt mean “nothing” (of course); masel is myself; fitba, football; ootay, out of; wisnae, wasn’t; nawe, and all; goat, got; puff, life; gaunny, going to; when eb kens that every cunt’ll ignore um until eb speaks—when he sees that every fellow, etc.

In this follow-up to his celebrated Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh frequently wrests a nervy Joycean haiku from his phoneticisms. One wispy section of “Sexual Disaster Quartet,” for example, casts a man's sexual history into a brief scatological scrawl: “Rab's nivir hud a ride in eh's puff; perr wee cunt. Disnae seem too bothered, mind you.” Not every line in The...