But the wonder of The Adulterants is how we feel ourselves rooting for Ray even as we acknowledge that he deserves everything he gets. Throughout a series of escalating catastrophes, our deadpan antihero keeps up a merciless mental commentary on the foibles and failings of those around him, and the vicissitudes of modern urban life: internet trolls, buy-to-let landlords, open marriages, and the threat posed by more sensitive men. The Adulterants would be a coming-of-age story if its protagonist could only forget that he is thirty-three years old. Not until the summer of 2011, when discontent is rising on the streets and within his marriage. He has never been caught up in a riot, nor arrested, nor tagged by the state, nor become an international hate-figure. Without it we’d have no Madame Bovary, no Anna Karenina, no Scarlet Letter. Adultery is bad for marriage, but good for literature. He has never committed adultery with his actual body. Review: The Adulterants by Joe Dunthorne. He is a man who has never been punched above the neck. 'Every lost generation needs its memorial and now at last we have The Adulterants.Ray Morris is a tech journalist with a forgettable face, a tiresome manner, a small but dedicated group of friends, and a wife, Garthene, who is pregnant. With lacerating wit and wry affection, Joe Dunthorne dissects the urban millennial psyche of a man too old to be an actual millennial. Enter the world of ironic misanthropy and semi-ironic underachievement, of competitively sensitive men, catastrophic open marriages, and lots of Internet righteousness. But Ray is about to learn that his special talent is for making things worse.īrace yourself for an encounter with the modern everyman. His career as a freelance tech journalist is dismal but he dreams of making a difference one day. He only sometimes despises every one of his friends. He mostly did not cheat on his heavily pregnant wife.
'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 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.
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