Ticking the boxes

How do you describe novels written by a Fellow of All Souls, laced with extreme post-modern self-consciousness and lavish with cultural references, but revolving almost entirely around graphic permutations of the sexual act? As a genre, it can surely only be called clever-dick-lit.

This is Adam Thirlwell’s second foray into this exclusive terrain. His first work, Politics, hit the news when he was included as the youngest writer in Granta’s 2003 list of Best Young British Writers before the novel was even published, which may or may not have affected the reviews. A sour note of envy was certainly struck by some.

Often, a clever young author will show off by writing a completely different sort of second novel: a fine way to advertise that one’s original narrative voice was only a brilliant, fooling, illusory persona. But Thirlwell’s second novel ticks many of the same boxes. It begins with an aging libertine watching through a crack in a cupboard door as a young girl has sex with an abusive boyfriend; climaxes in a sex-scene which, as readers of Politics will almost expect, begins with micturition and bondage and goes on quite a long way from there; and ends with a postscript which boasts that the author has included quotations from 48 alphabetically listed sources (from W.