Book reviews roundup: Evicted; The Bricks that Built the Houses; The Blade Artist

What the critics thought of Evicted by Matthew Desmond, The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate Tempest and The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh

Evicted, a study of America’s poor by the Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond, was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a timely and important book. In the Sunday Times, Ed Caesar praised it as “a monumental and vivid study of urban poverty in America”, though it had lost some urgency as Desmond’s fieldwork was done in 2008-09. For Jason DeParle of the New York Review of Books, Desmond is “one of a rare academic breed: a poverty expert who engages with the poor”. In the New York Times, Jennifer Senior described the book as a “regal hybrid of ethnography and policy reporting … an exhaustively researched, vividly realised and, above all, unignorable book – after Evicted it will no longer be possible to have a serious discussion about poverty without having a serious discussion about housing.” For Danny Dorling, writing in the Observer, the major lesson of the book was stark: “America shows us where Britain is heading.”

The Bricks That Built the Houses, the debut novel by the poet and rapper Kate Tempest, proved to be literary Marmite: the critics who hated it really hated it. For Fiona Wilson of the Times, “This is a novel of discontentment, rage and good intentions that is let down by cardboard cut-out caricatures and uneven storytelling … If this book is a wake-up call, then I overslept.” In the Independent, Suzy Feay was even more negtive. “You can be moved by her insistence that everyone has an interesting backstory, while being irritated by the tedium of being told about it,” she wrote. Tempest’s “authorial sympathy is strictly rationed” and “the writing is a strain”: all in all, “this makes White Teethlook like Middlemarch.” For Francesca Angelini, writing in the Sunday Times, the book was “surprisingly conventional”. Tempest is a “worthy champion for a generation of disillusioned youth, but her passion overwhelms her writing, precluding nuance and depth.” It was left to Andrew MacMillan in the Independent to flag up some of the positives. “This is an ambitious novel with a relentless thrust … Thepace is often breathless but that, perhaps, just reflects the culture of youth and the culture of our capital city.”