The Voids

Starred review from June 6, 2022
Scottish author O’Connor delivers a searing and passionate debut from the voice of an angsty young Glaswegian who squats in a mostly abandoned high rise he calls “the voids.” The unnamed narrator is dejected after a breakup and newly unemployed, and fills his depressed days by aimlessly wandering the city’s underbelly. He goes to bars, trips on LSD, meets girls, and commiserates with the broken and downtrodden. As his life devolves into chaos, one highlight is when he steals a bag of cocaine from a gangster on a rainy night that ends in disappointment and desperation. Despite the despair and depravity that suffuses the narrator’s Glasgow, he exudes a fierce, glowing vitality, describing snowmelt from rooftops as “the tears of a city” and a mountain range he once saw in Italy as “lifted straight out of the mind of God.” Through his suffering and the madness of his lifestyle, he accumulates a treasure-trove of dazzling, almost saintly insights into human nature, noting, for instance, that regret imbues people with “the loneliness of an empty church.” Readers will be lifted by his protagonist’s commitment to finding beauty in the darkness.