Review of The Adulterants by Joe Dunthorne 10/7/2018 3:49:33 PM
Joe Dunthorne’s latest novel, the aptly-named, The Adulterants, is a gleeful and wicked romp centering on a Millennial Londoner and his cringe-worthy misadventures as he fast approaches fatherhood.
Protagonist Ray Morris is a tech journalist—a glorified online content writer—a thirtysomething man-child and expecting father, navigating the urban terrain of modern-day London. Ray, married to the more-responsible, Garthene (an ER nurse), is not a particularly likeable person. Amoral at best, Ray is a self-absorbed, overthinking, narcissist with questionable judgment who—over the course of the novel—finds himself in bed with his best friend’s wife, enjoying a stolen beer while watching looters ransack a neighborhood bodega (echoing the 2011 London riots), and eventually (and deservingly so), under house arrest.
“Throughout our twenties, nobody in our friendship group had been willing to admit they wanted to procreate,” Ray tells the reader. “It was a shameful, secret pursuit, like skiing.”
The novel speaks to the current generation whose independent adult lives now begin much later, and there’s a sense—at least in Ray’s case, that despite his marriage to Garthene, he’s still very much in post-college mode with his partying, drinking, and temporary employment. The Adulterants is episodic—a novel told in five parts—which include sections centering on Ray and Garthene’s mutual friend, Lee, whom temporarily sleeps on their sofa after he and his wife, Marie, separate (following a drunken Ray’s flirtation with Marie); an episode of civil unrest in London which subsequently leads to Ray’s arrest; and the eventual birth of Ray and Garthene’s child.
Dunthorne has a wry wit and comedic timing, and there are many instances where Ray’s keen observations and self-deprecating humor is laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, this reviewer couldn’t help but hear David Mitchell’s Peep Show character, Mark Corrigan, reciting the lines. Upon turning himself in to the police, Ray remarks, “The cop shop, I thought to myself, enjoying language previously unavailable to me.”
The Adulterants is Dunthorne’s third novel (his 2008 debut novel, Submarine, was adapted by Richard Ayoade into a critically-acclaimed film of the same name). This novel has a similar cinematic feel and seems tailor for celluloid. The Adulterants is a fast-paced and pleasurable read—even when it veers off into the more unpleasant domain of infidelity, viral media, and the protagonist’s own self-destructive tendencies.
