One thing I’m curious about is that this one was originally much longer. Offill: Please call your next novel Star Hand Car Wash and Car Park. Even now, whenever I cycle past Star Hand Car Wash and Car Park in Dalston, I feel a frisson of excitement. I started seeing single-vowel words everywhere.
I had a definite Oulipo phase when I got into writing stories and poems that only use one vowel. But in general, I like to use restrictive structures. Jenny Offillĭunthorne: With this novel, the only constraint was Ray’s worldview. When things start to go wrong, he realizes there are some problems that being funny and clever can’t solve. When I describe it that way, it sounds like Revolutionary Road, but with millennials and more jokes. He spends a lot of time hanging out with his more attractive friends and trying to buy a shitty apartment that is somehow still miraculously within the city limits of London. Ray Morris is 33 with a pregnant wife and an easy, stupid job writing tech columns. I’d describe it as a coming-of-age story about a guy who was supposed to be done coming of age a long time ago. Exciting twists and turns, I would even venture to say. Indeed, the whole novel is full of these quicksilver emotional shifts it ranges page to page from wrist-slittingly dark to lightly optimistic and back again. So far, I have discerned only that his brilliant idea was to make it both funny and sad at exactly the same time. The ending of Joe Dunthorne’s new novel, The Adulterants, is so good I had to go back and reread it immediately to try to figure out how he did it.
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