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THE ACID HousE by Irvine Welsh. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995. 289 pages. $11 paper.
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 Acid House crackles with such pink, new, hell-bent freshness, such an evident ear for living speech. Yet a sense of the newly imagined clings to almost every story here, brilliantly so where the demotic, the drugged, the ironical, and, sometimes, the surreally flamboyant are boiled together with a rough and fierce naturalism.
Welsh is most at home with working-class Scotsmen in Edinburgh, London and on the continent who live in vibrant stalemates with heroin addiction, personal dead-ends, joblessness, and romantic blague. Indeed, a large portion of Welsh's genius lies in...