Adam Thirlwell’s prodigious output includes Kapow!, a typographically tricksy novella set during the Arab spring; Multiples: 12 Stories in 18 Languages by 61 Authors, in which he coaxed A-list writers around the world into translating one another for kicks; and a short-lived sex column in Esquire, which recounted dilemma-laden scenarios in the archly erudite style he patented – from a blueprint provided by Milan Kundera – in his 2003 debut, Politics, a threesome tale published when he was 25.
His new book isn’t easy to get a handle on. Seemingly set in pre-revolutionary France – the specifics are hazy – it follows Celine, a socialite targeted by a pornographic smear campaign of slut-shaming pamphlets. With a friend (and later, lover) named Marta, she organises a fightback with a playwright and police chief, among others, in a circle gathered at a series of parties fuelled by “takeout” from a restaurant nearby. Later, Celine travels not only to America but the moon, where she meets an alien named Harper – and did I mention Celine fights Napoleon?
The Future Future establishes its trick-mirror ambience well before those shenanigans, thanks to the oddly nonspecific vantage point implied by Thirlwell’s wantonly anachronistic diction. Celine, kicked out by her husband, puts her possessions “in storage in a suburb warehouse off the northern freeway”. Fungal growth in a forest is described as a “little process of apparent self-assembly – the way a group of people might take over a disused gas station and somehow transform it into a cinema for the benefit of the whole community”. The dialogue is equally discomposing. Characters say things such as “I’m not like trivialising your pain”. When Thirlwell first mentions a bureaucrat named Yves, the narration breaks off:
– Yves? said Beaumarchais.
– You know him? said Lenoir.
– I mean kind of, said Beaumarchais.
As with frequent references to “fucking”, the jolts delivered by this continually wrongfooting register eventually come to seem almost cynically deployed to distract us from our dawning awareness of the novel’s nigh-on inexplicable lack of excitement.
It’s strange: when the novel starts, Thirlwell’s distinctive cadence – always above the action, more commentary than narrative – initially makes us feel in safe hands. But by degrees his voice steadily starts to squeeze oxygen out of the book: whether Celine gives birth, meets a talking fountain in space (really), or learns that her estranged husband has been executed (“This upset her more than she would have expected”), nothing seems to leave its mark, and the reader ends up as unmoved as the protagonist.
The suspicion grows that Thirlwell’s fiction works best as small-canvas sex comedy, as in Politics, whose title was a joke, or in Kapow!, which dared us to chide him for thinking sex a fit subject for a story of revolutionary Cairo. Where that book felt audacious, his more ambitious enterprise here – a crowded cast, a surfeit of action – ultimately requires a brand of narrative alchemy unsuited to his relentlessly synoptic style.
A parallel thread involving the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture supplies little more than meaningful mood music regarding the ills of colonialism, in the same frictionlessly well-meaning way that the main storyline highlights misogyny.
You could see the book as a slantwise take on the internet, sure, with the growth of writing in the 18th century standing in for Musk-era digital chatter – an analogy regularly underlined by some neat verbal slippage (“They messaged each other every hour”) – but Thirlwell could just as well have explored that idea in one of his typically wide-ranging critical essays. In the end, The Future Future is a puzzle: a writer as smart as this has no business being boring, but then neither does a novel whose heroine walks the moon and wrestles Napoleon.
The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
