Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, Bring the House Down, is set for publication July 8, 2025. The novel follows a culture writer, Sophie, sent by a British national newspaper to attend the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a three-week summer performance festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sophie leaves her partner and baby back in London while she travels to Edinburgh, sharing an apartment with womanizer Alex Lyons, fellow arts critic and the child of a renowned theater star.
On one of the first nights of the festival, Lyons quickly dishes out one of his well-known, scathing, one-star reviews — the critic only gives one or five stars to shows — to a young actress’ debut one-woman show. Later that night, while Lyon’s words are processed for the morning print at the paper’s London headquarters, the actress, Haley Sinclair, and Lyons meet. After a night of romance, in which Lyons withholds his real name and job title, Sinclair wakes up in Lyon’s bed to a barrage of messages regarding the review. After connecting the dots, Sinclair, rightfully pissed, directs her anger back into her show, renaming it The Alex Lyons Experience. The performance takes a new form, disparaging Lyons and the patriarchy he seemed to represent. The new performance is a hit, selling out each night and garnering a wide online fanbase.
In the novel, this unfolds not through the eyes of those directly involved, but a third party, Sophie, who bears witness to the public outrage toward her colleague-turned-roommate. Alex, who starts off as a sort of superior to Sophie, comes to depend on her as news continues to arise about his uncomfortable romantic history. As Hayley continues to air Alex’s dirty laundry, he falls from his successful and respected position to that of a social pariah. Sophie’s physical closeness to Lyons, who has certainly caused pain to many women, offers the reader a unique perspective. It is because of this perspective that we can sympathize with Lyon’s charm, despite knowing his actions.
While Sophie’s relationship to Alex provides an interesting angle to his story, Sophie’s voice tends to be a tedious one. The story is helmed by a self-deprecating narrator with weak opinions — unlikely and unlikeable qualities for a critic. She pities herself for the way she dresses, the way she looks, and her inclination to play it safe, rather than take risks like Lyons. Sophie doles out four-star reviews even when she finds a performance boring, out of fear that she must not have understood something fundamental to the work. That is largely the point. Her character is one with taste but without conviction — the root of unhappiness in her career. Through this narrator more subtle themes — grief, relationships, and parenthood — seep in.
There is a refreshing honesty to Sophie’s reflections on arts writing, as if written for other critics. In the acknowledgements, Runcie thanks the reader, “even/especially if [they] write a review!” In one moment in the book, Sophie recalls listening back to interviews with artists early in her career. She would cringe at how desperate she was to appease her subject. Rather than push a more serious question, she would pause, unsure whether to confront the interviewee or to be likeable. Yet, those moments of pause, which a critic would see as insecurity or failure in themselves, would often lead the conversation to take an unexpected turn. Perhaps there is a special quality in an insecure interviewer: the ability to truly make their subject comfortable.
In many ways, Bring the House Down is a simple, fun novel that stimulates a rate of page-turning akin to that of a tabloid magazine. As we know from recent media phenomena such as the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni conflict — all these years after the #MeToo movement — a strong market for a cancellation story remains. The book attempts to answer the ethical question that often crops up: what really becomes of the “cancelled?” The truth is, probably nothing. If the entire world can learn Alex Lyons’ name in a day, they could certainly forget it.
In the book, the voice of the masses bites at the chance to rip apart a rich, white, “nepo baby” man. Haley Sinclair has a skillful way of making one woman’s story relate to every woman, making Alex Lyons represent every man in the world. Still, the fictional response to this experience says even more about the state of criticism, an already dying art. Aside from all of Alex Lyons’ other qualities that make him an inherently privileged, hateable person, he is a critic, perhaps the most abhorred figure in our oversaturated media landscape. In a time when readers turn to Goodreads, moviegoers open Letterboxd, and diners pull up Yelp, the choice to garner recommendations from one newspaper critic rather than 200 anonymous reviewers seems impossible. With the knowledge that we can all be critics — of course, only as one single rating in the hundreds of Amazon review entries — newspaper criticism seems pretentious, reserved for too few people with too much power. Bring the House Down and its narrator, Sophie, speak from a true love of criticism, spotlighting the fact that criticism itself seems to be on trial. Can the form survive, or should we, like Sophie, look elsewhere?
