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A review by eims86
White City by Kevin Power
5.0
'In some secret corner of my brain I felt a tug, and then a slump, as if some crucial beam or joist had finally given way to rust or metal fatigue.' This is how antihero Ben reacts to the news that he is to be cut off by his parents at the age of 27, in the midst of an investigation into his father’s financial wrongdoings. Half-writing a novel called Decay: A Report, struggling through a PhD, and with no income other than a stipend from his parents, Ben is in a quandary. Fending for himself leads him to a call-centre job, an actress girlfriend, a drug addiction and a dodgy property deal in Serbia.
Privileged and scornful of pretty much everyone, but also funny and self aware, Ben is one of the most entertaining antiheroes I’ve read in ages. Visiting his thesis supervisor, he muses: ‘Here was a vision of the life I might already have earned, if it had ever occurred to me that I needed to earn anything.' At times, he’s oddly relatable: a frustrated artist, he dreams of living alone in a cabin in the woods, with nothing but books and wine for company. His friend group is made up of ‘a loose assortment of junior scholars, zine-editors, slam poets, bloggers, graphic designers, publishing interns and student journalists … We went to book launches and flirted with each other ... We complained loudly and often about how Dublin was being taken over by vulture funds who had rendered the city unaffordable for artists. We lived on allowances from our parents, or in apartments in boomtime residential units bought for us as graduation presents.'
Power has a way of introducing characters with a phrase or two that makes them startlingly familiar. The crowd at a funeral: 'Cousins, uncles, aunts, family members, all with similar faces, like different editions of the same book.' The Lads, the crew of private school ex-rugby players who ensnare Ben in their dodgy business deal: ‘that granitic crew of jocks and jeerers, those slab-like avatars of heedless privilege, with their monster-truck shoulders and their buzz-cut designer dos.'
Power wrote a brilliant Irish Times piece about why it took so long for his second novel to appear (Bad Day in Blackrock, his excellent debut, came out in 2008). It’s been worth the wait – White City is beautifully written, relentlessly entertaining, and everything is earned.
Privileged and scornful of pretty much everyone, but also funny and self aware, Ben is one of the most entertaining antiheroes I’ve read in ages. Visiting his thesis supervisor, he muses: ‘Here was a vision of the life I might already have earned, if it had ever occurred to me that I needed to earn anything.' At times, he’s oddly relatable: a frustrated artist, he dreams of living alone in a cabin in the woods, with nothing but books and wine for company. His friend group is made up of ‘a loose assortment of junior scholars, zine-editors, slam poets, bloggers, graphic designers, publishing interns and student journalists … We went to book launches and flirted with each other ... We complained loudly and often about how Dublin was being taken over by vulture funds who had rendered the city unaffordable for artists. We lived on allowances from our parents, or in apartments in boomtime residential units bought for us as graduation presents.'
Power has a way of introducing characters with a phrase or two that makes them startlingly familiar. The crowd at a funeral: 'Cousins, uncles, aunts, family members, all with similar faces, like different editions of the same book.' The Lads, the crew of private school ex-rugby players who ensnare Ben in their dodgy business deal: ‘that granitic crew of jocks and jeerers, those slab-like avatars of heedless privilege, with their monster-truck shoulders and their buzz-cut designer dos.'
Power wrote a brilliant Irish Times piece about why it took so long for his second novel to appear (Bad Day in Blackrock, his excellent debut, came out in 2008). It’s been worth the wait – White City is beautifully written, relentlessly entertaining, and everything is earned.