Negative book reviews are fun:

Every few years, as a reviewer, one encounters a novel whose ineptitudes are so many in number, and so thoroughgoing, that to explain them fully would produce a text that exceeded the novel itself in both length and interest. Faced with such a book, one wishes only to let it slip quietly to the seabed of culture, there to join thousands of other unneeded books in their slow, silent compaction into the limestone of literary history.

Ouch. But I think this is even more damning:

Although it fails at every imaginable level — metaphysical, ethical, technical, thematic — it is at the stylistic level, the level of the sentence, that Welsh’s novel is most wanting.

Guess he didn’t like it.