Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse for our roguish protagonist, things continue their downward spiral ... Dunthorne is similarly cold-blooded in his treatment of Ray, a figure you simultaneously feel empathy for, yet wouldn’t mind seeing a little sense knocked into ... Dunthorne — also a published poet — has a humorous, well-observed precision to his writing ... It makes for a slim novel (just shy of 200 pages) that feels at once entirely true to its city, characters and moment, but also a broader, wry and angry comment on our times.
Dunthorne is a superbly economical writer – he crams an awful lot of plot into 173 pages – and one with a poet’s sensibility: a room is described as 'uncle-scented'; a paper plate of baba ganoush is 'smooshed' under a shoe. He is also properly funny. There are several snort-through-your-nose moments, including Ray’s encounter with a policewoman, when his every word exacerbates his predicament. But throughout, the novel’s comedy is always balanced by insight and poignancy.
The Adulterants is a very funny comedy of arrested development ... It’s rare today to see a really talented writer go all-out for comedy, but Dunthorne makes it look like the obvious choice ... And where so many modern British novels with modern British settings founder in their attempt to wring compelling dramas out of trivial, uneventful lives, Dunthorne seems on very solid ground. What other form except broad comedy could you use to depict these pampered kidults, with their carpenters’ shirts, their fancy smartphones and their pointless jobs? ... brief and accessible, but very carefully crafted ... Readers who are allergic to irony and archness may not be impressed—the book is so arch that you could drive a horse and carriage through it—but it provides a steady flow of good gags and is, in its way, satisfyingly resonant too ... By the end, the novel has proposed an original conception of innocence; sympathy and contempt, warmth and acidity, irony and sincerity are mixed up together in surprising but satisfying proportions.
There’s a terrifyingly knowing eloquence to the voice of Ray Morris, the narrator of Joe Dunthorne’s third novel ... The Adulterants, from its punning title onwards, is brilliantly knowing about its knowingness. It knows the only way we’ll tolerate a narrator as annoying as Ray is to punish him for the very virtues that make him a good narrator – nosiness and eloquence. Ray shares these virtues with the main character in Tobias Wolff’s now classic short story 'Bullet in the Brain', in which a know-it-all literary critic caught up in a bank robbery gets shot in the head for taking the piss out of the cliched way in which the bank robbers speak. In Wolff’s story, the punishment for knowingness is death; Dunthorne is more forgiving, but offers a more indirect route to redemption.
Darkly funny, Ray’s story embodies the modern failure-to-launch affliction, the problems of an adult who will not grow up. His many missteps and often selfish mien are excruciating to read, but Dunthorne’s conversational style is the perfect tone for delivering this late coming-of-age story with humor.
The Adulterants is another wincingly good and brilliantly observed novel ... Dunthorne downplays the scorn and the gags to enable his antihero to emerge as a tragic, self-deluded figure deserving of our sympathy. A novel that gets off to a faltering start tracking shallow lives and superficial feelings quickly tightens its grip, and its focus, and turns into a riveting read led by a character we care about and believe in.
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 ... 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.
What follows is a broadly sketched comedy of errors ... Dunthorne also masterfully ratchets up [protagonist] Ray’s escalating troubles, culminating with an arrest ... 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.
