‘The Tenderloin’ by John Butler
Another day, another debut. OK, so it may have been more like a week, but, in the interest of being succinct, it stays. Last Tuesday, or sometime thereabouts, I began reading Irish writer John Butler’s debut novel The Tenderloin. Named for the famously ropey section of downtown San Francisco, the city in which the novel is set, The Tenderloin follows twenty-one-year-old Evan from the Irish Sea to the Pacific Ocean on a journey of self-discovery and occasional self-destruction, charting the many obstacles and oddballs he encounters on the way. Strictly speaking, it is a coming-of-age story, yet there are a few fresh elements thrown in for good measure, namely the dawn of the internet and, of course, the character’s exodus from strait-laced Dublin to eclectic, liberal-minded San Francisco.
The Tenderloin begins very well, exploding in a sherbet bomb of wit and wry perceptiveness - a remark about the American fondness for acronyms had me in hysterics on the very first page, mainly because it was so accurate, and barely twenty pages in I was introduced to something called a champagne blowjob. And, yes, it is exactly as it sounds. Furthermore, there are a handful of moments in the novel (don’t worry, I won’t spoil them here) in which tensions, be they sexual or nervous, run extraordinarily high, and John Butler is brilliant at creating suspense in these relatively short bursts. However somewhere towards the end The Tenderloin loses its sparkle, and the wit and lucidity displayed in the first few chapters succumbs to a kind of emotional murkiness. The book’s epilogue is particularly jarring as it involves a change in perspective as well as a tonal one-eighty, and though the closing paragraph was tidy and pleasing I also had to wonder how relevant it was to The Tenderloin as a whole.
Nevertheless, there is a great deal to admire about The Tenderloin. John Butler has an incredibly light hand and an obvious talent for comic writing - his humour is the effortless, self-evident kind, the kind which may not sell itself as humour but that gives rise to much chuckling regardless. It is just a shame that this gets lost somewhere around the home stretch, though I feel that I understand what Butler was trying to achieve: coming-of-age novels are often belittled and bashed but, hell, they’re a great deal more difficult to write than they seem. Finally, The Tenderloin drops all the appropriate references. Whether its mid-nineties TV or the unique spirit of San Fran herself, Butler manages to get it all in.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in September 2012.