Moral Obligations

The title of Adam Thirlwell’s third novel Lurid & Cute is revealing. It is suggestive not only of the novel’s plot, but also the character of its notorious narrator and its divisive reception by readers and critics alike. At the start of the novel for instance, the narrator (who remains anonymous throughout) wakes up in a motel room to discover that he is not only in bed with a woman who is not “his happy wife,” but also that this woman—his now-mistress—has blood hemorrhaging from her head. Moreover, this blood is definitely the consequence of the previous night’s obscene exploits, which were, the narrator admits, fueled by ketamine. Yet, despite the vulgarity of the situation, our narrator feels tortured by moral conscience: at first, troubled by the fact of “waking beside a person who is not ethically your own” and later protesting, “I’d easily say I was a model citizen. I don’t think that’s exaggerated.” Lurid & Cute is, in other words, a novel about what it means to be human and to behave morally; it asks whether it is possible to be both “way out innocent” and “the least talented gangster” and therefore whether the line between morality and immorality is really as self-evident and absolute as it seems. In answer, and through the musings of its self-conscious narrator, Lurid & Cute suggests, “the basic moral problem is quite obviously we are more than one person.”

Moral choices, particularly those relating to the personal and the sexual, have been a frequent preoccupation of Adam Thirlwell’s fiction. The British novelist, born in 1978 in London, burst onto the literary scene when he was selected as one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” in 2003—before his first novel was even published. Politics (2003) —winner of a Betty Trask Award—came out later that year and narrates the sexual exploits of a threesome as a way to consider the fundamentally moral and political complications of determining mutual ideals. In The Escape (2009), Thirlwell’s second novel, a retired and aged Lothario attempts to redeem his past infidelities by travelling to the alpine spa town of his deceased wife’s family villa in the hope of reclaiming it. Thirlwell has also published a work of nonfiction, Miss Herbert (2007)—winner of a Somerset Maugham Award—and a novella Kapow! (2012) in which a jet set London hipster becomes enthralled by the Egypt uprisings and the Arab Spring. In all his fiction, Thirlwell’s—sometimes unlikeable—narrators provoke questions about the relationships between personal lives and more universal moral obligations.

In Lurid & Cute, readers are subjected, overwhelmingly, to the inner personal life of Thirlwell’s first-person narrator. The narration is, more or less, completely monologue—with the exception of occasional snippets of dialogue—and in keeping with an interior monologic style, time in Lurid & Cute refuses the constraints of linear chronology in favor of stretched and dislocated temporal experience. As a category, time is itself subject to the whims of the narrator; thus for readers, the narrative seems to blur from one scene to the next, transported through the narrator’s poignant yet pathetic ruminations. Such temporal disruption and disorder to the narrative is, of course, knowingly performed. In relation to time, our narrator concedes, “From this distance, it’s impossible to know. So many time frames were occurring all at once! They overlapped and dislocated. But still, I was definitely occupied.”

There is a self-indulgence to Lurid & Cute’s monologue form, befitting of its narrating “I.” Set in a “megalopolis” that namelessly represents any major city in the world, Thirlwell’s vague urban location and narrative style are an attempt to reduce the distance between narrator and reader so that the interaction feels live—and uncomfortably so, due to the debauched nature of much of the action. The narrator’s vanity and hedonism seem boundless, describing himself variously as a “dauphin,” “a libertine of absolute unimpeachable openness,” or “like any other utopian or tycoon.” He participates in an...