The Tenderloin

by John Butler (Picador) ISBN: 978 0 330 51988 5

This is Irish Times columnist John Butler’s debut novel and it has all the winning appeal and with you would expect from an Irishman.
It is set in San Francisco in 1994, just as the city is on the brink of the Dot Com boom when, as the narrative lets us know, ‘the meek were about to inherit the earth’.
The main character Evan arrives in town with his friend, Milo, and takes a job at an Internet company run by Sam Couples. Smooth as silk and highly seductive, Sam soon becomes a father figure and idol for our sexually ambivalent hero. 
Things just get complicated when Roison, Milo’s ex-girlfriend arrives, to remind Evan of their one-night encounter. As things start to go wrong at the company, Evan is forced to come out from the shadow of his friends and forge his own identity.
The Tenderloin is a pitch-perfect, brutally insightful portrait of life in America in the Clinton years, filled with observations on the digital age, drugs and Deadheads. It is funny and sharp – although the jumps in time do make the narrative confusing at times.
Refreshing, charming, infectiously readable, John Butler is a new writer to watch.
 
Anthony Ehlers
4/5