’Lurid & Cute’: an exhausting peek into an unreliable mind

“Lurid & Cute” by Adam Thirlwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 358 pgs., $26)

“I wish confessions did not ever need to happen. Confessions, it seemed to me, were a total illness of our time.” So says the narrator of Adam Thirlwell’s entertaining and exhausting new novel, “Lurid & Cute.”

But to what is he confessing? In the book’s first scene, he wakes up in a hotel room next to Romy, a tall, blond female friend — “not my happy wife” — who is asleep (or unconscious) and bleeding.

A parade of uncertainties begins here. The nature and extent of Romy’s injury is not clear, and the narrator practices an ornate form of evasion, spending a lot of words on the scene without bringing it into sharper focus. We’re in an unnamed city, in the head of an unidentified man, witnessing what might or might not be an awful crime.

Soon Thirlwell switches to a more comic register, as the narrator describes being just over 30, still living at home with his parents and his wife, Candy. He writes of his very comfortable upbringing and education: “I suppose what I’m trying to say is that everything was very soft and delicious. The juggernaut of meaning, let’s say, was not parked heavily on our lawn.”

An only child, he describes himself as a dauphin, a prodigy — of what, he doesn’t say — living a fattening existence. But beneath the recounting of his everyday life lurks a foreboding tone. “Events will become much worse,” he tells us early on. Later, he claims to be telling his story from a vantage point in the future, when he is “maimed and aged and all alone.”

In genealogical terms, “Lurid & Cute” lives on the crowded tree that springs from Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” The epigraph of Thirlwell’s book is taken from Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger,” another obvious progenitor. Like most of the narrators in this genre, Thirlwell’s is garrulous and neurotic. (Dostoyevsky’s called himself an “irksome babbler.”) He is endlessly analytical, misanthropic and darkly funny. He’s also logorrheic, the kind of guide who can over-explain an orgy, which he does for nearly 20 pages. At the orgy, which he describes as the “quiet and industrious” kind, his wife and mistress cross paths, so to speak.

The book’s plot, such as it is, has two main strands. The first concerns the states of the narrator’s marriage and of his affair, and his creepily amoral assessment of them. “It turns out,” he says, “that in the perfect marriage where you are absolutely trusted there is no end to what you can do.” The second is his friendship with a man named Hiro. They eventually turn to an almost casual life of armed crime, including a holdup of a nail salon. These incidents notwithstanding, very little happens outside the narrator’s head in “Lurid & Cute.”

Inside his head it’s a chatty tour of quotidian philosophical concerns: the nature of marriage (“a grand and permanent problem” and “the purest of moral conundrums”); the larger possibility of happiness; how to spend one’s time; and the curse of hypochondria. (“If you imagine something afflicts you that is in fact not afflicting you, how can you ever tell the difference? Inside the thought balloon it is absolutely as bad as the medical textbook thinks.”) One of the best of these extended riffs is a contemplation of attending parties: “The motives for ever leaving a house and entering society are often flawed or even dangerous.”

The dominant subjects come to be the causes of fear and the consequences of violence. After many ruminations about these themes, Thirlwell’s narrator notes the uselessness of “protective thoughts,” because “when danger approaches it will still approach, however much you have worried about it earlier.” But is the narrator the danger or the endangered? This unsettling question hangs over the novel, and the protagonist’s seesawing unreliability feels intentional and well executed, not the jarring result of tonal indecision. It’s often hard to tell whether he is overreacting to something or psychotically understating a horror; whether he’s a deluded, spoiled brat or a cunning sociopath.

In the literary circles of his native Britain, Thirlwell, 36, is a lightning rod. Granta magazine twice named him one of that country’s best young novelists — the first time when he was 24 and hadn’t published a novel. (“Lurid & Cute” is his third.) Ever since, he has been a high-profile Rorschach test for critics there. American readers approaching his work without strong opinions about his precocity might be surprised by the strongly divided reactions overseas. In the United States he can simply be what he is, a very talented if fallible writer.

If Thirlwell had taken further inspiration from “Notes From Underground” and kept his new novel to a tidier length, its pleasures would have been even more potent. As it is, the book, like its orgy scene, is both stirring and tiresome.