Review: Lurid and Cute - Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thirlwell’s fifth novel begins with a nameless man waking up in a hotel room next to a woman who is not his wife. In the time it takes for him to check out, eat breakfast, and return to collect his bag, she begins bleeding from the nose. Clearly he needs to get her to hospital (they have been doing ketamine together the night before), but equally, he feels he must do so without his wife, or the authorities, finding out. At this point, fate intervenes: 'if you want to know what fate feels like, it feels like this. You are holding a body in your arms, and then you hear a brisk knock, followed by a key card being slotted into place'.

Thirlwell takes this pulp fiction set-up and fills it with strangeness and doubt. One impulsive decision (to take the girl to hospital anonymously rather than calling for an ambulance) leads to an inescapable chain of events, which run out of the protagonist’s control: 'that's what I mean by catastrophes being endless. Every time you think the day of judgment has been averted, it returns. And yet, however, you can still avert it after all'. There is something of the tragic Lady Macbeth in his character’s compulsion to plunge deeper and deeper into untruths and obfuscations rather than come clean (blood is a recurring theme here, too).

Stylistically, there is less of the Kundera influence which marked Thirlwell’s early novels, with sections of Lurid and Cute having a strong alt.lit feel to them. This is a natural reflection of the author’s concern with the trials of adapting to life in the digital age. He observes, at one point, that ‘every human now is more historically documented than Napoleon’, and so, rather than making oblique references to character traits, he seeks to swamp the reader with detail. At times, as in an eight page, somewhat disassociated, account of an orgy, this works well, but elsewhere there is some slightly clumsy prose (‘the iPad warm on my warm thighs’) and a feeling of ennui which builds up as the novel progresses.

The humour of the novel comes from Thirlwell’s deadpan satire of narcissistic, shallow youth. The protagonist is torn between his ‘fear of missing out’, and a loose sense of morality ('I do not like to do things that are wrong. I am totally against it'). Therefore he involves himself in his friend Hiro’s schemes, whilst maintaining the façade of the disinterested outsider. Reflecting on the orgy scene, he explains that ‘a lot of thoughts and counterthoughts were occurring at this time, so many that it turned out I needed the orgy for distraction, and so I watched, like it was television'. Whilst taking part in an armed robbery with Hiro, he thinks only that 'I very much wanted to be doing this for as little time as possible’.

Thirlwell also highlights the character’s unwillingness to accept responsibility. He pleads that his ‘capacity for transgression had been very small', but that he was powerless against the endless possibilities that modern life allows us. The fault lies not with him, but society: 'I do think we live in a very dangerous age. I mean dangerous for one's moral life: for in the previous eras... it was perhaps not so easy for the average bookish student in the marshland cities to get hold of a gun, or other accessories. But now so many things are available from the flat depths of a computer screen'.

The big reveal comes when the tables are forcibly turned on him, and he realises that his actions do in fact have consequences. Previously, the assumption had been that the things he does for gratification (affairs, robberies) have no effect on others, and it takes him being forcibly placed into a position of vulnerability (and the murder of his dog) to puncture his self-obsessed outlook.

Lurid and Cute begins promisingly, before running out of steam as it reaches a conclusion. For an author who has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, this is disappointing. The wit and energy of novels like Politics feels as though it has been watered down and there are few of the stylistic flourishes that characterised his previous work. While there are sections which work well, and the concept is appealing, the overall effect is a let-down.