A talent to amuse — and offend — with sexual shenanigans

Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell (Cape, £16.99)

Adam Thirlwell, 37, is an extravagantly gifted novelist whose fiction looks unflinchingly at sex and finds a lugubrious comedy in human failings. His first novel, Politics, published in 2003, was good enough to put him on Granta’s once-a-decade “Best of Young British” list, and invited critical opprobrium as well as praise. In the manner of the tricksy Czech author Milan Kundera (Thirlwell’s hero), the novel was wildly digressive, with pages of modernist preening in which nothing much happens. Inevitably, such smarty-pants fiction divided the critics.

Lurid & Cute, Thirlwell’s third novel, is more of the same, only so much better. Set in the near future in a nameless city that could be London, it combines elements of heist-movie mayhem with high-jinks picaresque. Laden with typographical eccentricities and engagingly quirky philosophical ideas, the novel is the fruit of no little brainiac intelligence. Some may find it an annoying, mere pomp of words but I loved it. Thirlwell’s is a street-savvy, supple prose by turns slangy (“schlub”, “shonky”) and erudite. Beneath the linguistic bravado lurks a writer with a real vocation for wit and satire.

The book is narrated by a ghastly narcissist (“I totally do look nice”) who loves to party. How his wife Candy puts up with such a spoiled, smug creep is a mystery. A virtuoso of mendacity, he is sexually unfaithful (“Lying is lovely”) as well as a devotee of internet porn and Page 3 girl smut. A man so inadequate is bound to come a cropper.

Early on, he is seen to wake up in a strange room on the “edges of a giant city” with the body of a bleeding, comatose woman lying in the bed next to him. How did she get there? The memory of the previous night’s drug-taking, sex and drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with bewilderment and guilt. Some “narco moll” or “beatnik schlub” must have broken into the room and done violence.

Like the poet and novelist Craig Raine (who taught Thirlwell at Oxford), Thirlwell likes to disconcert and give offence. In quasi-medical language he describes an orgy that involves a super-abundance of anal sex. All this would be dull were the writing not so good.

What the novel is really about is anyone’s guess, but Thirlwell keeps the pages turning. For all his ghastliness, the narrator draws the reader in partly because he sounds so delightfully unhinged. The book has no through-narrative, no drive, no grease; but what it does have is a winning undertow of macabre whimsy and a masterly turn of phrase.

Go to eveningstandard.ca/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p