Of all the jobs in the world, it would be fair to say that novelist and English lecturer are among the most stereotypically bookish of the lot. So, it should have been no surprise to see that Kevin Power’s Zoom background was a delightfully Jenga-like jumble of volumes, squeezed into what must be the country’s most strained shelves outside of Santry Stacks.
He assures me that in his eyes, however, they’re not full enough yet: “I’ve missed bookshops for a year now, going into bookshops was something I’d do two or three times a week – it was one of my major activities in life.”
If public health considerations had permitted, it’s likely he would have made a few extra visits this week to sneak a proud glance at his own second novel, White City, recently published by Simon & Schuster.
“There’s an old writer’s joke that goes if someone asks you what your book is about, you say it’s about 450 pages – a writer is probably the worst person to ask to summarise their book.”
However, he does make an effort. “It’s a kind of satire or black comedy, but I also hope it goes beyond that”, he begins. “It’s about privilege – specifically the son of a wealthy banker – and it was very much inspired by seeing Ireland’s banking and business elite exposed and deconstructed in the public eye during the aftermath of the crisis in 2008.”
“I guess [the narrator] is not a particularly likeable figure”, Power says, describing the character as privileged and intellectually arrogant. “He thinks he’s going to be a writer and is basically pretending to do a PhD in Joyce, but not really doing any work and just sort of hangs around smoking and posing, insulated by his father’s wealth.”
His father’s wealth runs out however, leaving him working in a call centre with little sense of self-worth. Then “he runs into an old school friend who offers him the chance to get involved in a slightly shady property deal in the Balkans”.
Does Power feel that Irish writers have a responsibility to deal with the legacy of the financial crisis?
“I don’t think you can prescribe to writers”, he responds. “I didn’t set out consciously to write a novel about the financial crash and its aftermath, it was just that that was the stuff I was interested in.”
“Fiction comes largely from the unconscious, actually. You end up writing about what preoccupies you.”
Power mentions that he has always been interested in the ruling elite, how it came about and how it reinforces itself. He also expresses admiration for Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll-Kelly books, arguing that “those novels are much angrier and darker than they’re often given credit for”.
Is his attraction to social critique and broader questions of power in some way a reaction to other contemporary writers who have been drawn towards more personal autofiction?
“I’m not particularly interested in presenting myself in my fiction, because I think fiction is a made object”, Power replies. “It’s a kind of machine that you build carefully that will release certain emotional and intellectual energies if you’ve built it properly.”
Power’s first novel, Bad Day in Blackrock, was certainly well built enough to win critical praise and a Rooney prize in 2009. There was also a popular film adaption, What Richard Did, made in 2012, which likewise met with much acclaim. Does he feel any pressure to repeat this success the second time round?
“The pressure’s long since faded away because it’s been so long. It feels like I’m starting again in a funny way, which is nice – It’s quite liberating”, he says. However, it’s the writing he gets the meaning from, not the publication, I’m told. “I feel mainly excitement and nervousness that people will read it.”
As well as producing his own work, Power is a well-established reviewer of the fiction of others. “One of the things that being a book reviewer does is that it shows you all the ways in which a novel can go wrong — it’s a negative influence but a strong influence”, he says. In terms of positive influences, he admires Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, and the great American-Jewish writers saying, “they are for me a kind of benchmark of achievement”.
Power’s academic and critical work has very much focused on the American tradition. “It was and remains my great literary passion, but it also gives me some freedom from thinking about Ireland.”
He explains that he doesn’t want too many other visions of Ireland in his head, and that he sometimes feels that the Irish literary tradition – “this worship of Joyce, Beckett, Yeats and Wilde” – can be quite oppressive.
“In wanting to write about Ireland as it is now, I’ve [found] much more encouragement and inspiration in writers from America and the UK”, Power explains, saying that he wants an Irish version of the sort of “urban, comic, satirical, expansive fiction” they’ve been producing for years.
Power is not the only contemporary writer who supports himself with university-based work, including teaching creative writing. We talk about how this increasingly prevalent system for supporting established writers affects the literary landscape.
“It has had to happen because various things have made it much more difficult to make a living as a writer,” he says. “Most book sales are of a relatively small minority of very successful, popular writers so that literary fiction, for want of a better word, is mid-list and tends to be supported by the publishers’ bigger selling books.”
Power stresses the importance of having a ‘day job’ for contemporary writers of literary fiction. “For me, a university is the best place for a writer to be — you met smart people and other writers and you get to talk about the things you’re interested in.”
To produce good work, in Power’s view, it is first of all necessary to make sure you are financially and emotionally secure: “What you need as a writer is a safe perch from which to look out onto the world.”
