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For all its suspicion of the contemporary artworld and its machinations, the art critic’s debut novel remains surprisingly sincere about art itself
\n\n\n\nThe unnamed narrator of Ben Eastham’s debut novel, The Floating World, is, like Eastham himself, an art critic. Grieving his recently deceased wife, he feels lost while teaching at a school where the students refer to him as ‘Doctor Pissington’. Then a friend offers him a job back in the artworld. He is to work on ‘The Floating World’, which is ‘a gated community beneath a giant dome on a desert island’ being built by a tech billionaire for the wealthiest as a refuge from climate crisis and political collapse. Our morally conflicted protagonist is hired to conduct research for an art exhibition marking the island’s inauguration. The novel negotiates the contradiction of inhabiting a contemporary artworld sustained by the good intentions of art workers who align themselves with beauty and virtue, while depending on the very forces their work purports to resist.
\n\n\n\nIt opens with the narrator, in Ireland, on the verge of writing, before disappearing into his recollections, and eventually returns to the point at which the story is being written (more on which later). Grief provides its emotional landscape: the narrator’s reality is shot through with the frenetic despair that comes with the sudden loss of his wife. His grief gradually becomes entangled with the project of ‘The Floating World’ and the people making it, forcing a confrontation with the loss he has been carrying. It is in such experiences that resist ordinary expression that art becomes most meaningful: a painting, for example, that is ‘a truth that didn’t need explaining. No aristocrats, no symbolism, no lies. A painting clear as love’; and another, when the narrator’s friend likens the experience of pregnancy to a painting they once saw in a museum, in which ‘The colours are stronger and brighter, there’s a texture. It’s like breaking through a screen, the world feels bigger, like it can’t be contained.’
\n\n\n\nEastham is at his most sensitive when criticism itself becomes inadequate. There is a pleasing irony in an art critic writing about an art critic for whom, and for the artists around him, the most profound encounters with art seem to occur precisely when interpretation fails. While Eastham is tender in his descriptions of art, his acute observations of the people surrounding it can be lacerating. He has a formidable talent for summoning up a character – or skewering one – in a sentence. One woman possesses ‘the erotic hauteur of an academic who in her youth danced beneath filtered spotlights at psychedelic happenings’. Another, ‘a woman in those oversized metal-rimmed spectacles designed to signal to civilians that the wearer is an intellectual’. Eastham is exacting not only when it comes to how people appear, but also about the identities they are trying, sometimes desperately, to project. Despite the grieving anguish of its narrator, it is his wry, deadpan humour that carries the novel. There is a dryly comic sparring match with a ‘philanthropist’ who believes happiness can be quantified, and a conversation between partygoers about where, literally, ‘the shit is going’. At times it is not unlike a drawing-room comedy, with its sharp wit, back-and-forth banter and clever insults.
\n\n\n\nThe metafictional frame allows the novel to avoid the aftermath of its most dramatic events, dwelling instead on the act of remembering and reconstructing them. I’m not convinced this framing adds to the reader’s understanding of the narrator’s grief or the events being recounted. The narrator returns to remarkably similar emotional terrain at the end: melancholic and still lost, but perhaps slightly more hopeful for the future. For all its suspicion of the contemporary artworld and its machinations, The Floating World remains surprisingly sincere about art itself. This is especially persuasive when Eastham uses art to give shape to experiences that elude explanation – love, pregnancy, grief – reminding us that beneath the bullshit posturing of the artworld is an unexpectedly earnest faith that art can make felt what we cannot quite articulate.
\n\n\n\nThe Floating World by Ben Eastham. Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99 (softcover)
\n\n\n\nFrom the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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