Wednesday 22 June 2011

The Tenderloin by John Butler


The TenderloinWell how time flies and 2011 becomes subject to some sort of time dilation effect whereby months become weeks and the hours in a day become nothing but blinks and frowns…
The Tenderloinis a district in San Francisco don’t you know, and this book, just about to be published in the UK  has passed by my jaded eyes recently.
Now then if I had a pound for every book cover that had the hyperbolic statement `a spectacular new Irish talent' splattered across it, I'd be a rich scarecrow.  So it was with such a grumpy attitude I approached this book and unfortunately [again], my reservations were well founded. Someone like John Butler may have contributed to The Irish Times, San Francisco Chronicle and written/directed shorts for the Irish Film Board etc etc etc, but a good novelist and subsequent debut novel it does not necessarily make.....
The basic premise of The Tenderloin is promising; it charts the early dot.com years in California, as seen through the eyes of an Irish émigré, even if it is another case of the Irish apparently being able to drift effortlessly into and around the US penniless and without employment, when the rest of the western world has to queue for green cards.
The central character, Evan, arrives in San Francisco in 1995 as a 21 year old virgin. He at first bums around not doing very much feeling intensely lonely, gets a job in the lower reaches of a flash, start-up dot.com business where he develops a crush on his [male] boss. He then has to struggle [well a bit anyway], with his [perhaps] latent homosexuality, loses connection with his best friend who he'd travelled to California with and alienates Roisin, another close friend who had travelled out to team up with them, and then goes home.  
And that's about it.
There are some hints at the absurdity of this huge, new business model as neoliberal ideology finally hit its stride in the early 90s, but no sense of any real insight into its true nature, and I think that is a massive missed opportunity, and there are plenty of others like that in this novel.
To be fair there are some truly touching moments of insight in the book though. For example Evan in his loneliness starts following families [at a distance] into Fisherman's Wharf some evenings, just to try and glean some innocent, familial warmth from them. He casually tells someone about this in a bar but ends up getting cold shouldered as some sort of pervert. This is a clever illustration of how you can feel deep disconnectedness in a foreign country and the insular, judgemental nature of our culture these days. There is also a genuinely funny scene where Evan has an encounter with an ice sculpture, and a nice set piece when Evan is out sailing with his boss and wife and things go awry, but these parts of the narrative where Butler hits his stride only added to my frustration with the book in its entirety, and the nagging feeling that it could all have been so much better.
The book really only takes off as an intriguing novel at the very end, where the perspective changes from Evan to his friend Roisin, which fascinatingly puts Evan into a wholly new perspective, with his proto-alcoholism laid bare and the hint of life and people going in circles-cycles. These final few pages are Butler really writing and are very, very good, and the sole reason I had to in the end give this book three rather than two stars. In fact if you do start reading the book, it is worth hanging in there for the final sequence alone.
To be honest, at the end of the day I think the book has been published too soon, with probably only 75% of the editing/writing process done properly. And I read the final advanced copy, so it is not work in progress. It is also telling that the publisher's blurb informs us proudly that there is a lot of movie interest in it, and that makes sense, because in the end, one can't help feeling it has been written with the focus firmly on a screenplay first, and as a rounded novel second.
One final thing: technicalities. Butler uses that technique so beloved of the Celtic fringe: the use of hyphens instead of speech marks. It takes great skill and attention to detail to pull this off, which writers like Roddy Doyle and Niall Griffiths on the whole manage to do, but this author doesn't. The whole flow of the narrative is broken as you keep having to work out who is saying what to who, and unfortunately it makes the whole book more laborious to read than it should be. It really is a technical trend in contemporary novel writing that should be put quietly to sleep.
So on the whole,
despite the publishers blurb, Butler isn't a new Brett Easton Ellis or Nick Hornby. He doesn't have the droll irony and cool detachment of BEE, nor has he the metrosexual `confused but well-meaning' gentle humour of Hornby. In the end he has produced a book more like something a committee might write and, ultimately, is as a result strangely soulless.
Now looking back over this review I feel as if maybe I have been a little harsh; there is the potential for a great book in here somewhere and I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it at all, because Butler can write emotively and with a fair degree of charm when he wants too. But it's been wasted in this book, and it may once again be down to the poor quality control [a.k.a. laziness] of some of our major publishers these days, who seem unprepared to push further the writers they have signed up, or even look for extraordinary writers to define the new century we are all hurtling through.