BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, by Charlotte Runcie
How cruel may a critic be? I ask for a friend.
David Niven was once dismissed as “tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.” (He hung the review in his bathroom.) John Simon described Barbra Streisand’s nose in “A Star Is Born” as “a ziggurat made of meat” bisecting the screen like “a bolt of fleshy lightning.”
Having never gone further than calling an actor confused or miscast, I find such put-downs shocking. But they pale in comparison to Alex Lyons’s review of Hayley Sinclair in a one-woman Edinburgh Festival Fringe production called “Climate Emergence-She.” After disemboweling the script, Lyons turns his attention to its author and star. “Hayley herself is so tedious, and so derivative,” he writes, “that after you’ve endured the first 10 minutes of what the venue is loosely calling ‘a show,’ you’ll be begging for the world to end much sooner than scheduled.”
Should Lyons, the lead critic at a major British newspaper, be canceled for that? How about if, in the hours between writing the pan and its publication, he picks up Sinclair at a bar and sleeps with her? She reads her one-star review in the morning, not knowing until then that the man she spent the night with was its author.
And does it change the moral calculus if Lyons was right? The show sounds truly dreadful.
Those are the questions heating up Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, “Bring the House Down,” which enjoyably pours fuel on both his and her sides of the dispute. Lyons is basically a #MeToo straw man, so grossly cavalier and indifferent to the sensitivity of other people, especially women, that you’d want to cancel him just for existing.
Nor does Runcie make Sinclair a shining heroine. In a canny and commercial act of revenge, the character instantly revamps “Climate Emergence-She” as “The Alex Lyons Experience,” dredging up the history of the critic’s indiscretions and releasing the monster of internet rage. With its parade of guest star exes and its bonus semi-nudity, the new show is the hit the old one could never be.
Though “Bring the House Down” has surely been exaggerated for our pleasure, Runcie, a British arts journalist, went through a similar shaming in the early 2010s, after giving a now-famous comedian’s Fringe show a two-star review. She gets the critic’s peculiar brew of idealism and indifference just right, noting that Lyons rationalizes his nastiness as a way of “contributing to the culture” and “maintaining high standards” yet also sensing that it’s something weirder: a form of self-pleasure. “Dazzled by the brightness of his own cruelty,” she writes, Lyons feels “the thrill of a strongly held opinion, well-expressed,” as a physical delight.
If that makes him an awful man, and I’m not sure it does, he’s the greater character for it. But alas, neither the overstated Lyons nor the underbaked Sinclair is the novel’s central figure. Lyons’s meek junior colleague Sophie Rigden is. Promoted only recently from writing “13 things you never knew about Picasso” listicles, she has been dispatched to Edinburgh to review art exhibits; when Lyons, sidelined from the theater beat, is billeted to obits, she must take up his pen and cudgel.
Her reluctance makes that a dreary outcome for both Edinburgh and “Bring the House Down.” A critic whose questions about criticism cancel out her commentary is little use to anyone. “Did I have a greater responsibility to the actors onstage, the company and crew who made this obviously high-budget and well-rehearsed show,” Sophie wonders, “or to the audience around me? Or to the people reading the paper, who would never see that particular production, but who kept up an interest in theater and just wanted some opinions to chew over with their breakfast?”
Saddled with such doubts as well as standard rom-com burdens — a tired marriage, a child back in London who needs mothering, an unlikely attraction to Mr. Wrong — Sophie sinks the middle of the story like the center of an iffy soufflé.
The edges of the soufflé remain tasty though. Lyons has an overwhelmingly charismatic mother, recently made a dame in recognition of her stage career. A bit of a monster herself, if a glamorous one — “her fingers and wrists were gilded with nuggety rings and heavy resin bangles” — she provides a clue to her son’s apparent disdain for theater folk. Unable to secure her attention in childhood, he makes sure to get the attention of other actors as an adult.
But in indulging that bit of psychology, “Bring the House Down” sidesteps the most interesting question I wish it would answer. Should critics tell their absolute truth, even if it hurts? For Lyons the answer is yes: “A doctor saying that you have cancer doesn’t give you cancer. You had the cancer already and the doctor just pointed it out.” That seems a little extreme to me, but I’ll buy another of his hot takes: “Clarity is generosity.”
In that spirit I give “Bring the House Down” three stars. It’s neither a bomb like “Climate Emergence-She” nor a blast like “The Alex Lyons Experience.” It’s a pleasant ride smack in the middle.
BRING THE HOUSE DOWN | By Charlotte Runcie | Doubleday | 304 pp. | $28
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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