An Interview with Adam Thirlwell

ADAM THIRLWELL

Born in London in 1978, Adam Thirlwell has published two novels, Politics (Jonathan Cape, 2003) and The Escape (Jonathan Cape, 2009), as well as a novella, Kapow! (Visual Editions, 2012). His latest novel, Lurid and Cute (Jonathan Cape), is slated for publication in January 2015. Thirlwell’s literary career had a dramatic and perhaps even controversial start when, at the age of twenty-five, he found himself on Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists,” a list the literary magazine has published every ten years since 1983. The controversy stemmed from the fact that Granta’s list appeared in 2003, the same year as Thirlwell’s debut novel, and, most significantly, before the novel had actually been published. Indeed, writing in The Guardian, Stephanie Merritt complained, “seriously, how can the judges possibly predict with confidence how Monica Ali or Adam Thirlwell will develop as writers before they are even published?” The Granta issue featured Thirlwell’s short story “The Cyrillic Alphabet.” His debut novel Politics won him both international recognition and a Betty Trask Award for first novels by authors under thirty-five. The Escape was short-listed for an Encore Award for best second novel.

Betty Trask Awards are given for novels written “in a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, style,” a criterion which seems somewhat at odds with Politics. The novel does tell a love story of sorts: a boy (Moshe) meets a girl (Nana), but then boy and girl meet another girl (Anjali). At the heart of Politics is a threesome. Rather than narrate this burgeoning romance in a chronological form, Thirlwell begins the book with an in medias res sex scene. And this particular sex scene is not a sleek erotic encounter but a naive, unsuccessful attempt at debauchery, complete with pink fluffy handcuffs. On opening the book, readers are therefore transported not only into an initial meeting with characters caught in the sexual act, but into an act perforated by the nerves, insecurities, and ultimately embarrassments of those characters. Moshe is cast as “a nervous sadist, a shy sodomite” (8), a paradoxical description hardly befitting the style of a romantic novel.

Underlying the radical and often disastrous romances of Politics is a political and ethical investment of sorts. The title of the novel is therefore both misleading and revealing. While the title Politics denotes the seriousness and philosophical musing available to a literary work, the novel itself does not offer explicit political debate. Rather, the narrative tenders a series of attempted sexual escapades. As the publisher’s abstract for the book confesses, “Politics is not (quite) about politics.” But it’s not not about politics either. In his fiction, Thirlwell repeatedly explores the moral concerns of individuals against the backdrop of a larger political landscape. In the midst of the sexual exploits that open Politics, for instance, Moshe finds himself wondering about the problems of Israel concurrently with the glitches in his failing attempt at sadomasochism. The distracting effect of global politics is expressed in a single fleeting sentence: “He [Moshe] relaxed on top of Nana and mused on Israel” (10). The coordinating conjunction “and” connects two verbs, the former offering the material details of the sex act while the latter represents Moshe’s mental cognition. The cause-and-effect relation between Moshe’s attempt to sodomize his girlfriend and his ambiguous thoughts on Israel is abstruse. Simultaneously, since this sentence is separated from the surrounding text as a paragraph in its own right, it is foregrounded visually as important in some way. For readers, therefore, the connections or disconnections between people’s everyday lives and world events are marked yet open to interpretation.

Moshe’s anxieties heighten during this episode; still, Thirlwell continues not to disclose their content, whether sexual or political:

He relaxed on top of Nana and mused on Israel.

Now, this should have been the lowpoint of Moshe’s evening. But it was not. It got worse. He lay there, quiet, and started to think. As he thought, he became mildly hysterical. Yes...