A Taste for the Obvious

Brian Dillon

• BuyThe Escape by Adam Thirlwell
  Cape, 322 pp, £16.99, August 2009, ISBN 978 0 224 08911 1

The Escape is Adam Thirlwell’s third book. His first novel, Politics, was published in 2003 and won some acclaim for its energetic smut and (less frequently) for its alternately faux-naif and overreaching prose. He followed it in 2007 with Miss Herbert, a vagrant disquisition on the nature of style in the novel that had the feel of a lot of flashy undergraduate essays determinedly tacked together to make a passably book-like structure. But the source material was smart enough (it was often very clever indeed) to make this seem a project perversely worth pursuing. The book enraged so many middling and middle-aged reviewers – some of whom actually took Thirlwell to task for the crime of being young – that one badly wanted to warm to its refreshingly callow, hectoring and capacious take on the history of fiction. Sadly, Miss Herbert was not what it seemed, and over the long (600-page) haul Thirlwell’s mild nostrums about the primacy of world over word, story over sentence, often undermined his formal ambitions and traduced his declared admiration for stylists such as Flaubert and Nabokov.