The Written World - Essays & Reviews

by Kevin Power

Art honours the world, and criticism honours art, even – perhaps especially – when the critic sets out to destroy. The bad review is hardly ever written out of mere spite. In most cases, the motivation is disappointed idealism. Critics are people who love art and who hate to see it traduced. Hence the critic’s sempiternal cry: You’re doing it wrong. What the critic wants is for you to do it better.

Since 2008, acclaimed novelist Kevin Power has reviewed almost three hundred and fifty books. Power declares, ‘Even now, cracking open a brand-new hardback with my pencil in my hand, I feel the same pleasure, and the same hope. That’s the great secret: every critic is an optimist at heart.’

Art that thinks and feels at the same time – ‘good art’ – requires explication. The writing of criticism in response to such art is an activity that has taken place since Aristotle first sat down to figure out what made tragedy work. It is in the pursuit of this question – what makes good art ‘good’ – that Kevin Power found his vocation. During a ten-year stint as a regular freelance reviewer for the Sunday Business Post, Power fell in love with the writing of criticism, and with the reading of it, too, particularly by talented novelists who review books on the side. His conclusion is that criticism is absolutely an art. But it is never more so than when practiced by an actual artist.

These pieces, ranging from reviews of Susan Sontag to the meaning of Greta Thunberg, apocalyptic politics, and literary theory, represent a decade’s worth of thinking about books; a record of the author’s attempts to honour art, and through art, the world. In The Written World, Power explains how he became a critic and what he thinks criticism is. It begins and ends with a long personal essays, ‘The Lost Decade’, written especially for this collection, about his mental and writing block after publishing Bad Day in Blackrock and his decade-long journey to White City. The pieces gathered by Power are connected by a theme – this is a book about writing, seen from various positions, and about growth as an artist and a critic.

272 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published May 12, 2022

About the author

Author of Bad Day in Blackrock (Lilliput Press, 2008; Pocket Books, 2010), filmed as What Richard Did (Element Films, 2012). PhD in American Literature. Lectures in English & Creative Writing in the School of English, Dublin City University. Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 2009 and the Hennessy XO Award for Emerging Fiction 2008. Writes regularly for The Sunday Business Post and Literary Review. Has also written for The Dublin Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Dublin Review of Books, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, The Sunday Times, Strange Horizons, UCD Scholarcast, The Mailer Review, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, Emerging Perspectives, The Stinging Fly. Short fiction has appeared in Banshee, on RTE Radio 1, in Reading the Future (Arlen House 2017), in The Stinging Fly, The Sunday Business Post, The Hennessy Book of Irish Writing 2005-2015 (New Island 2015), New Irish Short Stories (Faber 2011), These Are Our Lives (Stinging Fly Press 2006), Guts, Circle & Square (Fiery Arrow 2015). New novel on the way. Tweets @KevPow3.

Reviews

[Jay Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kevin Power has a PhD in American Literature, so you know you're going to get essays and reviews that are smart, circumspect, knowledgeable, and enlightening. I was surprised at how many of the essays I had read before elsewhere, but that surprise did not undermine my enjoyment, probably because I found myself so often in agreement (warning: self-congratulation ahead!) with many of the author's insightful and intelligent opinions and arguments. I can even forgive the Envoi to Clive James, author of the execrably smug Cultural Amnesia (see my review elsewhere on this site), given that Power's review was written on the occasion of James's death. The scathing book reviews, most of which appeared in the Sunday Business Post, are of a kind rarely seen any more, and all the more heartening because of their thoughtful dissections and scurrilous iconoclasm. It's rare for me to give five stars to a book but, the last chapter notwithstanding, this was an unalloyed pleasure.

[Rachel Handley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty, wonderfully written, and thoroughly entertaining.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found myself nodding along to this often, although possibly due to Power and myself having similar circumstances. Reviews are a bit flat, never really coming down one way or another on anyone.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Most art sucks.” The Written World: Essays and Reviews collects a nice array of (largely literary) non-fiction writer by the novelist-critic Kevin Power. It opens with ‘The Lost Decade’, a short personal essay about the long years between his first two novels. It then moves through, in a series of thematic sections, writing on areas of overlap between literature and life; portraits (more or less) of other critics (and/or some of their works); treatises on certain contemporary crises; and a notable series of shorter reviews of novels, closing with a 2019 piece eulogising the late Clive James. These pieces, which all fill that titular decade of the opening essay, range from the favourable to the excoriating. There’s a vital “review” of Megan Nolan’s debut novel Acts of Desperation that simultaneously reviews the reviews garnered by that novel (‘A Perishable Art’); there’s the evenly brutal ‘Hating Jonathan Franzen’; there’s ‘Zadie Smith’s Uncertainty’, full of insight and appreciation, and a standout in ‘Susan Sontag’s Will’, which argues a move away from a biography of moral judgements when considering one of my favourite writers. I liked his savage satire of figures like Jordan Peterson and Arianna Huffington, his fair review of James Patterson & Bill Clinton’s joint novel (“complete nonsense from start to finish. I enjoyed it enormously.”), and reviews of novels I like by David Mitchell, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Aster, Sally Rooney. Even when I vehemently disagree with him, I’m impressed by his argument, his prose as much as his ideas: the hallmark, I’d say, of great criticism. This is, above all, a book for those who love books, who care for and believe in their creation as well as their dissection.

[Fredzed · Rating 1 out of 5]

“Art honours the world, and criticism honours art, even – perhaps especially – when the critic sets out to destroy. The bad review is hardly ever written out of mere spite. In most cases, the motivation is disappointed idealism. Critics are people who love art and who hate to see it traduced. Hence the critic's sempiternal cry: You're doing it wrong. What the critic wants is for you to do it better.”

Bullshit.
The walls have ears, Kev.

[Tony O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kevin Power, a clever guy with plenty to say in and on The Written Word. You may not read every essay and review in this book but if you choose wisely there is plenty to keep you engaged.