5/24/2023 0 Comments Joe dunthorne the adulterants![]() I had a definite Oulipo phase when I got into writing stories and poems that only use one vowel. But in general, I like to use restrictive structures. Jenny Offillĭunthorne: With this novel, the only constraint was Ray’s worldview. When things start to go wrong, he realizes there are some problems that being funny and clever can’t solve. When I describe it that way, it sounds like Revolutionary Road, but with millennials and more jokes. He spends a lot of time hanging out with his more attractive friends and trying to buy a shitty apartment that is somehow still miraculously within the city limits of London. Ray Morris is 33 with a pregnant wife and an easy, stupid job writing tech columns. I’d describe it as a coming-of-age story about a guy who was supposed to be done coming of age a long time ago. Exciting twists and turns, I would even venture to say. ![]() ![]() Indeed, the whole novel is full of these quicksilver emotional shifts it ranges page to page from wrist-slittingly dark to lightly optimistic and back again. So far, I have discerned only that his brilliant idea was to make it both funny and sad at exactly the same time. ![]() The ending of Joe Dunthorne’s new novel, The Adulterants, is so good I had to go back and reread it immediately to try to figure out how he did it. ![]()
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