Frieze Has Only Just Started, But Its Most Scene-y Moment Already Took Place

On the second floor of Soho’s Groucho Club, a vignette of Frieze week at its finest: Bella Freud and Amelia Dimoldenberg swapping gossip just out of earshot; Sadie Coles clinking glasses with Freddie Powell and Rose Easton; Alex Margo Arden, fresh from opening one of the week’s most hotly tipped shows, posing for her close-up; British Vogue contributing editor Osman Ahmed swishing through the room in a feather-trimmed 16Arlington skirt to join Alvaro Barrington and Chloe Wise, two of the most hyped painters of their generation.

Last night, the art world’s It-clique gathered at the storied Soho members’ club for something a little more understated than the raucous post-opening parties these walls are used to: an intimate toast to Scene City, the much-anticipated debut novel by London-based Irish-Iraqi writer Roísín Tapponi. The book, published by Verso, is Tapponi’s attempt to write “a 21st-century novel”, she says. “How our generation communicates is so specific – with things like doomscrolling, yapping, brain rot, Instagram caption sentences – and I was trying to take those devices and experiment with how they would look in novel form.” Less a plot-driven narrative than a chronicle of “a woman coming to terms with the art world”, as the 26-year-old writer explains, it sits loosely alongside works such as Calla Henkel’s Other People’s Clothes and Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love.

Tapponi wrote the book in her early 20s, when she was on a similar trajectory: founding and curating Shasha Movies, an independent streaming platform for film from the SWANA region, and establishing herself as an art writer. It follows a ragtag group of gallerinas and multi-hyphenate creatives as they flit between private dinners, booze-fuelled openings in east London and after-parties on the Edgware Road. Though neither autobiography nor autofiction, there are strong parallels between the world she imagines and that which she occupies today. (You only need to look around the room to see that.) As for the parallels between Tapponi and her protagonist, Romy? “The closest thing to me and Romy is that a lot of her opinions are actually my opinions about things,” she says. “There’s also a bit where she writes really well hungover – and I am so good at writing hungover. It’s my superpower,” she laughs, Johnnie Walker boulevardier in hand.

The overlap between the book’s pages and the crowd gathered to toast its publication doesn’t end there. While Scene City has only just been released, whispered guesses about the real-world inspirations for its characters have circulated since the first advance copies landed. We aren’t here to speculate or name names – if you know, you know! – but Tapponi is quick to stress that any seepage of real life into the text isn’t intended to offend. “There’s no gossip. There’s nothing salacious. But the book has a life outside the book world. It has a place in culture rather than in industry,” she says. “And I did three years of work to make sure that people weren’t offended or that people were happy. A lot of people had read it beforehand. I’m not trying to do Truman Capote’s Unanswered Prayers, when he burns every bridge.”

The turnout suggests she has swerved that risk. “I was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray the other week and there was this quote – essentially: ‘I prefer people to principles and even more people without principles,’” she says. “I think we’ve become so puritanical in the arts industry. In the actual world, people are listening to Sexyy Red and people want smutty literature. The idea that our generation isn’t drinking and is addicted to matcha… I don’t know who’s saying this myth, but I think people are still having a good time. They’re just not choosing to allow it to define them.”

Indeed, a good time was had – albeit not quite on the scale enjoyed by Teddy, Keshav, Tom and Oscar, the book’s clique of hard-partying east London art gays. “Ultimately, as much as this event is publicity for the book, it’s also a celebration and moment of optimism for London at a time when everyone in the art world is so nervous,” Tapponi says. “It’s a celebration of the world that I’m in.” To wit: When I clock out early (writing hungover is not my strong suit), the night is only just getting going. The crowd are scattered across sofas, deep in increasingly loud conversations, and while my group chats have yet to deliver a full account of what happened next, I like to imagine it unfolded much as Tapponi describes Scene City itself: “Just one long party, almost – one long night.”