A Review: Tapponi’s Scene City: A New Modern Novel
by Kris Rafferty
Róisín Tapponi’s Scene City is being marketed as Lawrence Sterne, Eve Babitz and Truman Capote pastiche, but this reader instead argues that this debut novel masterfully conflates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996) in both plot and narrative styles. Instead of Joyce’s Jewish/Catholic-Irish Leopold Bloom, Scene City’s protagonist, Romy, is a SWANA (South-West Asia and North Africa) woman, and a Londoner. And whereas Joyce’s Bloom spends a day in Dublin, Romy lingers in London, much like Fielding’s Bridget, acting as a modern-day Scheherazade, a (re)teller of tales that challenge norms and thus socio-cultural power structures. In all three novels, readers are challenged with inner monologues and streams of consciousness that contort language to create new ways of making meaning. Parody blankets these novels’ pages devoted to dissecting English society via doubleness. That is, to parody is to present an alternative (double) way of viewing reality. Romy calls it a “vibe.”
Notably, Tapponi uses many Joycean literary devices to challenge canonical representations. One such device is how Tapponi uses taboo. She has a character rub “dried snot scooped from the right nostril on the moquette of the Tube seat” (12). This cringey representation is an homage to Joyce’s “Proteus” chapter in Ulysses. Joyce’s version reads, "He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully.” Another example is how Joyce ignores the prohibition of alternative ways of performing sexuality. For example, Tapponi writes, “Like Stephen Dedalus, he was almosting it” (11). This line references a Tapponi character who is “performing heterosexuality” (11). As a literary device, taboo representations defy repressive biases. For Joyce, it was the Catholic Church, and the Irish and English literati who filtered out Joyce’s version of reality because they had the power to do so. What power is Tapponi pushing back against?
In Scene City, Romy is a Gen Z art history PhD candidate, a second-generation immigrant raised in Croydon, South London. Over the course of four days, Romy is seen achieving power (a place in the art world and academia) and railing against the lingering socio-cultural power (colonialism) that she feels asserts universal answers that she contests. Unlike the love and sex-addicted Bridget Jones, or the gloomy, impotent Bloom who feels lucky to have a job and a wife who cheats on him, Romy claims not to rely on exterior validations; she instead values her well-researched and internalized opinions. She cites Roland Barthes and name drops poststructuralist theory as casually as she references Peppa Pig gummy bears. Romy’s problem isn’t that she doesn’t have answers—like Bloom and Bridget—but rather that her answers aren’t perceived to be universal. In this way, Tapponi’s humour has the “vibe” of Fielding’s (Dorthy Parker-like) quips and her use of gluttonous drinking, food binging, and sexcapades narrations keep the novel’s tone light (Tapponi name-drops Renée Zellweger on page 14!). Such a Fielding “vibe” provides a sweetness that balances Romy’s acidic social commentary.
Language is Tapponi’s genius. Her narrator’s tone is jaded—“the art world version of Becky with the good hair”; “His identity was a less authentic kind than Rainer Maria Rilke’s”; “We floated down Brick Lane alongside flumes of fried grease”—and her imagery is Baudelairean: “luxury of gestures,” “floppy hair streaked across his forehead like wet paint,” and “soft-cheeked girls chewing plant-based gum wrapped up in a five-pound note.” Tapponi squeezes all the juice from her every sentence and triggers the reader to bark out a laugh one moment and then cringe a la Joyce the next. To this point, ‘Modern’ literary devices are everywhere in Scene City, and Romy confesses as much: “It’s difficult for writers to take their foot out of the grave.” This confession reiterates T.S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (1920). "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." Yes, Scene City borrows heavily from the Interwar ‘Modern’ literary era, but it’s different, too.
Despite the novel’s abundant subtextual homages, there is plenty that is new in Scene City. Tapponi’s deep dive into what makes identity and what it’s good for is at first presented as a mystery, and she keeps the reader guessing (not a bad thing for a novel). That’s part of the fun with Scene City. The narrator does not want to be pinned down because she refuses to limit herself with (cue the poststructuralism) representations not created by her. She shares a line early on, “This is an Irish book trapped in England and such activity is my birthright” (22). Trapped is the operative word here and should not be ignored when finding meaning in this novel. As noted, Scene City is flush with literary allusions worthy of the snootiest of literati, but Tapponi’s language—its “vibe”—is what makes it novel.
RÓISÍN TAPPONI is Assyrian Iraqi and Irish woman based in London. Her debut novel, Scene City, will be released by Verso Books in October 2026. She has guest lectured Oxford University, Sothebys Institute, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL), Royal College of Art (RCA) and Northwestern University and her recent book contributions include Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2025), Sarah Lucas: Bunny Book (Sadie Coles, 2024) and Urs Fischer: Monumental Sculptures (Gagosian, 2024).
KRIS RAFFERTY is a PhD student in the English Department at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Her major is Literature, Culture and Media with a minor in Critical Theory. She graduated with a BA from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and a MA in English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW). She has published eight genre novels that thematically elevate feminism and violence in traditional genre spaces. She won a Wilma Magazine 2018 “Women to Watch” scholarship with her literary short story “Invisible,” and published another, “Stop! Mom!” in UNCW’s literary journal Portals. Her scholarly article, “Chapter Two: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad: Representationalism, Physics and the Real” will be published in Palgrave Macmillan’s anthology, Literature Through a Philosophical Lens: the Readerly Imagination, ed. Gary Hasberg, 2026.