Adultery is bad for marriage, but good for literature. Without it we’d have no Madame Bovary, no Anna Karenina, no Scarlet Letter. In the 19th century the consequences of extramarital hanky-panky were severe. If you wanted to romp with a cavalry officer, you’d better be prepared to remorsefully throw yourself under a train pretty soon after.
Nowadays nobody minds about adultery all that much, which is probably why the heroes of Joe Dunthorne’s new book, The Adulterants, cheat on one another with such abandon. Ray, the hero, starts the novel pawing at Lee’s wife, Marie. Lee has had numerous affairs. Ray’s wife, Garthene, may be having it off with Peter, a male nurse. It’s a romantic tangle reminiscent of an Iris Murdoch novel, but with less posh names (well, Garthene might make the cut).
Few writers can have started out with as much hipster credibility as Dunthorne (his debut novel, Submarine, about teenage romance was turned into a film directed by Richard Ayoade with a soundtrack by Alex Turner). The characters in The Adulterants, his third novel, are feckless overgrown teenagers in their mid-thirties. Not many of them own property, but they waste money on expensive picnics with mackerel pâté and pitta bread. Ray is a freelance internet journalist churning out worthless clickbait. Garthene is pregnant and the couple are eager to scramble on to the lowest, wobbliest rung of the property ladder before the baby arrives. When Ray gets mixed up in the London riots of 2011 those plans go awry.
This set-up is largely a means for Dunthorne to skewer the smug liberalism and all-round uselessness of his generation. The reader starts out smiling along indulgently with his wry observations about modern life: “I glimpsed the stream of messages on her phone. An intimidating lack of emojis.” But then they keep coming . . . and coming. By my reckoning Dunthorne averages about three smart comments a page. The reader’s indulgent smile becomes strained.
In The Adulterants, the humour feels slapped on to the book’s events afterwards like a Post-it Note. House prices, slap. Recreational drugs, slap. Baba ganoush, slap. Everything earns its neat comic label. This is a shame because, line by line, Dunthorne is capable of being very funny. Like his feckless heroes he could do with a touch more sophistication.
The Adulterants by Joe Dunthorne, Hamish Hamilton, 192pp, £12.99
