The Adulterants
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the wickedly funny author of Submarine comes a hilarious new tragicomedy - a screwball tale of millennial angst, pre-midlife crises and one man's valiant quest to come of age in his thirties.
'Blisteringly funny and brimming with caustic charm - a joyous diagnosis of our modern ills that made me laugh out loud even when it was breaking my heart' Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies
Ray is not a bad guy. He mostly did not cheat on his heavily pregnant wife. He only sometimes despises every one of his friends. His career as a freelance tech journalist is dismal but he dreams of making a difference one day. But Ray is about to learn that his special talent is for making things worse.
Brace yourself for an encounter with the modern everyman. Enter the world of ironic misanthropy and semi-ironic underachievement, of competitively sensitive men, catastrophic open marriages, and lots of Internet righteousness. With lacerating wit and wry affection, Joe Dunthorne dissects the urban millennial psyche of a man too old to be an actual millennial.
'Every lost generation needs its memorial and now at last we have The Adulterants. It's very sad and very funny and written with an innocence that in fact is diabolical' Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid and Cute
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ray, the antihero of Joe Dunthorne’s razor-sharp third novel, is a fairly unlikeable, reasonably privileged and very lazy misanthrope. That doesn’t make his plight any less compelling. A middling London technology journalist ambling through with a new baby, a wife exhausted from her nursing career and a rogue’s gallery of dysfunctional friends, his missteps fuel a gleefully wry portrait of just how absurd modern life’s travails can be. You’ll recognise countless Ray’s from your own life, just one reason why Dunthorne’s writing is so brilliantly relatable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Antihero Ray, a 33-year-old freelance tech writer doing his directionless best to hold onto his youth, ambles through a marginally middle-class life in London in this dryly comic novel. His wife, Garthene, an ICU nurse, is well along into her first pregnancy, and is losing patience with his drinking, flirting, and general aimlessness. When Ray greets Garthene at the hospital with a bloody lip and black eye after being found in bed with his best friend's wife, the marriage collapses. Then, during the London riots of 2011, Ray happily accepts two beers from a looter, and finds his picture, "picnic-ready, smiling" with a beer in one hand and another peeking out of his pocket on a giant poster, requesting citizens to turn looters in to the police. To call the plot episodic would be generous, but Dunthorne (Submarine) zeroes in with precision on that period of life when work and family exert increasing pressure on immature young men. Ray, who narrates, has charm to spare, and his self-deprecating attitude goes a long way to compensate for his many flaws. Dunthorne's sly wit locates the humor in even the slightest and most depressing details, and his generous attitude towards his characters, survivors all, saves the novel from total snarkiness.)
