The Adulterants

January 1, 2018
Antihero Ray, a 33-year-old freelance tech writer doing his directionless best to hold onto his youth, ambles through a marginally middle-class life in London in this dryly comic novel. His wife, Garthene, an ICU nurse, is well along into her first pregnancy, and is losing patience with his drinking, flirting, and general aimlessness. When Ray greets Garthene at the hospital with a bloody lip and black eye after being found in bed with his best friend’s wife, the marriage collapses. Then, during the London riots of 2011, Ray happily accepts two beers from a looter, and finds his picture, “picnic-ready, smiling” with a beer in one hand and another peeking out of his pocket on a giant poster, requesting citizens to turn looters in to the police. To call the plot episodic would be generous, but Dunthorne (Submarine) zeroes in with precision on that period of life when work and family exert increasing pressure on immature young men. Ray, who narrates, has charm to spare, and his self-deprecating attitude goes a long way to compensate for his many flaws. Dunthorne’s sly wit locates the humor in even the slightest and most depressing details, and his generous attitude towards his characters, survivors all, saves the novel from total snarkiness. Agent: Seth Fishman, the Gernert Co.

January 1, 2018
Dunthorne (Wild Abandon, 2012, etc.) forsakes his erstwhile examinations of the adolescent mind to tackle one man's full-on fear of adulthood.It all starts at a party, as tales of a common lad's downfall so often do. Our narrator for this story of rapid decline is Ray Morris, a London man who is 33 years old and married to a very pregnant wife, Garthene, a dedicated but tired hospital nurse. There is a flirtation at this party between Ray and his mate Lee's wife, Marie, and a retaliatory punch that sends Ray reeling into a crisis of faith. "No surprise that those few seconds between the first punch and the second have come to stand in for probably three months of my thirties," Ray tells us. "That I had never been punched in the face before seemed faintly ridiculous. How could I claim full maturity without ever having jumped through that life hoop?" What follows is a broadly sketched comedy of errors, all leading to a pitiful but all-too-common resolution for Ray, largely based on his answer to Garthene's question, when, after the party, he shows up at the hospital where she's on duty, as to how drunk he is: "Very," he confesses. "And making terrible decisions." There's a frantic desperation to Ray's everyday life, even aside from his present troubles--he's a man who, while he will soon be a father, struggles to piece together a living as a tech journalist and fumes at the cash buyers who keep undercutting his desire to purchase an apartment. But Dunthorne also masterfully ratchets up Ray's escalating troubles, culminating with an arrest (following a riot) for aggravated trespass (breaking into a landlord's office) and receiving stolen goods (taking the proffered beer from a cheerful looter). Plus, Ray's smiling appearance on a CCTV camera ("Happy Tragedy Man" reads the headline) earns him a firing and ruthless trolling by the public. Will things turn out fine for our hero? Probably not, as happens so often.A domestic comedy that explodes the myths of manhood with joyful pandemonium.

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March 15, 2018

In this latest from Dunthorne (Wild Abandon), first-person narrator Ray is a thirtysomething tech writer who is emotionally drifting and amused and/or bemused by just about everything. The first half of the novel drifts with him and is mildly interesting. Then catastrophes hit. A house he and his wife are hoping to buy is sold from under them, and they begin to drift (that word again) apart. Worse, during the 2011 London riots, with the city burning and looters everywhere, Ray, wandering from a picnic outing and wearing an outrageous outfit, has his picture taken with a silly grin and a can of lager. Soon this image in outsized form shows up on a billboard, and Ray becomes an international symbol of blithe entertainment at the tragic riots (which is not far from the truth). He is then arrested, receives hate mail (and one very objectionable package), loses his job, is evicted from his apartment, and learns that his wife prepares to leave him for a male nurse. Ray's self-absorption shades this toward black humor, but there's a lot to muse on about today's mores. VERDICT The promotion says, "We feel ourselves rooting for Ray even as we acknowledge that he deserves everything he gets." Maybe yes, maybe no.--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

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