This article is more than 1 year old

Guantánamo Diary, Lurid & Cute and The Door

Gitmo stories, fantastical fiction and a contemporary classic

Lurid & Cute

Adam Thirlwell would seem to be the perpetually youthful winner of two Granta young novelist awards a decade apart. Lurid & Cute is his fifth book and takes place in the suburbs of a western city. It is the story of an anonymous, unemployed Jewish youth, described as a “prodigy” who ostensibly leads a sheltered life:

“The juggernaut of life was not parked heavily on our hero’s lawn” but our protagonist seems beset by anxiety: “I live at home with my mother and father and wife and feel as if I am in constant pain”.

The narrator seems to lead a dissipated and, at times, exalted existence. “A brand of butterfly I thought was extinct seemed to shudder past on a sweltering breeze… All the thundercats and Griffons I had never believed in were yawning and stretching their unwashed wings in the empty air,” he observes. Undoubtedly, Adam Thirlwell has his own style and a beautiful turn of phrase.

Lurid & Cute takes place in no specified location but has a mid-Atlantic dialect that makes it reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game, another novel featuring a nice Jewish boy coming of age and falling apart in a heady mix of sex, surrealism and elevated prose.

Adam Thirlwell, Lurid & Cute book cover

There is also more than a touch of the Woody Allen in this work. “My problems are psychosomatic, I once said to Candy – 'Psychosemitic', added Candy”. The narrator’s friend Hiro, is a brilliantly drawn idiot savant: “Energetic as a dot matrix printer… He could make a bingo hall… seem overgrown with unbelievable orchids”.

Hiro is the catalyst for mayhem, dispensing his own prescription drugs and talking his friends into acts of crime and decadence. “That’s what happens when you hang out with someone way ditzier than Buddha. It destroys all your moral faith.”

The hero’s increasingly reckless existence seems bound to end in disaster and, of course, does. The pets die, the girls leave. “Romy was gone, for ever, the way a marble statue might have been lost in more classical times… just tipped overboard from a trireme in the process of a shipjacking by a bored and overworked Viking”.

Yet even when everything turns to shit, our narrator maintains an ironic and detached voice: “Lurid is the best the cute can do in imagining such suffering” while “Outside the fascists are enjoying a boom and everyone hates everyone”. With a single narrator and a small cast, Adam Thirlwell’s seemingly autistic stream-of-consciousness delivery works really well. The poetic flights are impressive and intense, yet Thirlwell never strays far from the story in hand.

Lurid & Cute is a compelling and stylistically original work that stands out from the general dross of mainstream English literature. Definitely more lurid than cute, Adam Thirlwell is among the most interesting voices to have emerged in British fiction so far this century. This one is for lovers of language, fans of the best UK experimental fiction – the likes of David Mitchell and China Mieville – and readers who enjoy quality, quirky modern prose to digest.

Adam Thirlwell, Lurid & Cute book coverAuthor Adam Thirlwell
Title Lurid & Cute
Publisher Jonathan Cape
Price £16.99 (Hardback), £9.98 (eBook)
More info Publication web site
Next page: The Door

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like