Novel’s sea of similes almost drowns reader
Yet author’s brief moments of brilliant writing may be worth the swim
Lurid & Cute Adam Thirlwell Farrar Straus & Giroux
Like Marmite or the Middle East, Adam Thirlwell is a polarizing issue, showered with excesses of acclaim and contempt. Every new book seems to be hatchet bait: critics have flailed away, deriding his novels as “smug,” “monumentally annoying” exercises in “whimsy and pomposity” with the delivery of “a moronic postgraduate.” Yet he gets dust-jacket props from Milan Kundera and Tom Stoppard and enjoys a global reputation as the bright young thing of British letters.
Are these extreme reactions because he published his first novel at the precocious age of 24? Or just a healthy response to Thirlwellian hubris? The literary establishment piled on the hype. Granta magazine declared him one of the nation's great young novelists before he had written a novel. Thirlwell could not help this. But including a glossary at the end of his second novel explaining his literary allusions? That was on him.
So even the ampersand in Lurid & Cute, Thirlwell's third novel, feels like a provocation and certainly won't win over the haters. It's a kind of pastiche noir, narrated by a hysterically selfindulgent waster, who believes the “true sin is ennui.” He talks about growing a moustache; he participates in an orgy; he plays the banjo. This all happens in the suburbs of an unnamed “megalopolis” that appears to be populated entirely by idiots.
Thirlwell knows this lot are appalling. Even his narrator points out, in one of his many moments of reflection, he is “aware that the entire history of art is about removing the issue of the likable from the picture.” Later on, when he conceives of writing this very book, he tells us that it will necessarily be made up of “all the tones that no one ever admires, the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute.” Thirlwell's neurotic narrator might be drawn from Dostoevsky, but the kitsch is all Disney.
The action opens with the narrator waking up in a hotel room next to a woman who is not his wife. The woman is lying in a pool of her own blood and vomit, overdosed on ketamine. The narrator struggles to get her out of his room, into his car, and to a hospital. As he does so he experiences strange visions and a fraying of the edges of his reality. “Yes, I think it was about then that the first inkling began to occur to me — like the way you see a cat drift through some amateur porn footage and sit there, it occurred to me as backgroundly as that — that I might be doomed.” The girl lives but things start getting shady. The chase is on: The Furies are after him.
The porno cat is just the start. In the unstable world of Lurid & Cute everything is like something else. The similes pile up: Within one page the narrator's friend Hiro is compared to a nobleman with syphilis, a dot-matrix printer, a musket packed with grapeshot and a cowboy in his 10-gallon hat. Here's the narrator arriving at what he hopes will be a drinks party only to discover it is a political meeting: “it's difficult, when your social expectations are confused: a little like turning a page and discovering that in fact that last paragraph you just read was also the end of the book, or like when you see a child walk past then notice she has breasts and is a dwarf instead.” Yep, all the time.
Sometimes, though, Thirlwell nails it. After one upsetting discussion with a woman he loves, the narrator describes how jealousy “kept on working inside me, the way water keeps on rocking inside a bucket when you set it down.” When a prostitute sits down next to him and smiles, his mind goes blank “like the way the wheels on a suitcase go suddenly softly silent when they move from the sidewalk's tarmac onto lavish hotel carpet.” With the mannerisms and indulgences, the facile insights and reflexive playfulness, Thirlwell can charge his reader a steep price, but in the moments he writes like this, it is worth the cost of admission.