The Written World: Zingy, fun collection with a knack for the killer opening

The Written World: Essays & Reviews

Author: Kevin Power

ISBN-13: 9781843518327

Publisher: Lilliput Press

Guideline Price: €15

It might seem a touch presumptuous for a novelist to publish a collection of essays and reviews when he’s only two novels in, but wait a minute. First, these articles – most of which were originally published in the Dublin Review of Books and the Sunday Business Post – are good enough to warrant us being given what TV announcers used to call “another chance to see”.

Second, for admirers of Kevin Power’s fiction, these occasional pieces were pretty frequent, representing most of what he did when he should have been writing his second novel. (White City finally appeared in 2021, 13 years after his debut A Bad Day at Blackrock.) We know this from the opening piece, The Lost Decade, which appeared in this newspaper last year.

That piece is compelling reading, explaining how Power made the mistake – not an unusual one – of believing that writing a novel makes you a novelist. Rather, he slowly learned, it’s a job you learn as you do it, and a brilliant first novel is rarely more than an instance of very good luck.

So what did he spend the time doing when he should have been knuckling down? Reading, mostly, and writing about it. The Written World consists of what we might call 13 long ones and 22 short ones – essays and reviews respectively.

Most are on writers and writing, with the occasional lurch into the political. For example, Power writes with admirable breeziness – on reflection, that might be the only option – on the apocalypse mindset, the belief shared by 29 per cent of Americans that an apocalyptic disaster will occur in their lifetime, and which he identifies as a “secret dream of revenge”.

Or there’s a fun piece, perhaps too fun (it’s like shooting grey-eyed fish in a barrel), on Jordan Peterson, where Power considers him “one of the most fully-rounded and most tragically conceived, literary characters ever created” – though the feature relies on the liberal consensus that Peterson is self-evidently foolish and doesn’t seek to understand his celebrity-like success.

More representative, and generally more satisfying, is the bookish stuff. Power’s touchstones as a critic are mostly established monuments of literary culture, which we might divide into the – physically and reputationally – dead (Norman Mailer), the almost-dead (Martin Amis) and the contemporary (Zadie Smith). It’s no coincidence that these three are novelists whose criticism is sometimes better than their fiction. Power might belong in their company.

Even if you don't agree with them, the reviews are tremendous fun – and you will only agree with them if you think, as Power seems to, that most contemporary fiction isn't much good

Amis is worth singling out: he and his words appear throughout Power’s essays as a source and a checkpoint. This will come as no surprise to anyone who read White City, which in places was so devoted to the model of Amis that it was less homage than pastiche. (Amis: “In those three brief sentences we adumbrate a Mahabharata of pain.” Power: “In these four sentences I adumbrate an Iliad of error and illusion.”)

In his longer essays Power provides that sterling service offered in 4,000-word pieces generally found in publications called the [Location] Review of Books, of detailing and extracting the juice so efficiently from the book under review that we no longer feel any need to read it. See for example Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag. Spoiler: she was arguably “a terrible person”, though “it is the work that lasts, if it lasts.”

Stylistically, it’s in the shorter pieces that Power shines brightest. His book reviews are zingy and readable, with a knack for the killer opening. “Will Self’s Booker-shortlisted new novel is unreadable in two senses: it is difficult to read, and it is almost unbelievably bad.” “Annie Proulx’s new novel apparently took five years to write. It takes about five years to read, too…”

Even if you don’t agree with them, they’re tremendous fun – and you will only agree with them if you think, as Power seems to, that most contemporary fiction isn’t much good. Out of 22 short reviews here, only two avoid either a qualified thumbs-down or an out-and-out attack. (The two are by James Wood, whom Power worships almost as much as he does Amis, and by Sally Rooney.)

Once again, these reviews are fun – Arianna Huffington is “an expert on nothing who has an opinion on everything” – but there’s a risk that the energy created by a hatchet job drags judgment in its wake. (I can’t, for example, believe that a good reader like Power really thinks Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus is “religiose kitsch”.)

Perhaps the best piece of all in The Written World is A Perishable Art, where Power considers the state of contemporary literary criticism, weaving his way through the topic via reviewing reviews of Megan Nolan’s novel Acts of Desperation. A review of reviews – how self-indulgent is that? But who are you to complain? You’ve just finished reading one.