The Hampstead adultery novel is an extinct species that is constantly turning out, like the coelacanth, not to be extinct at all. I mean, of course, the sort of novel that tells you about middle-class London media professionals sleeping with people who aren’t their spouses – Iris Murdoch wrote several of the best (see, among others, 1961’s A Severed Head). There’s probably no getting away from it, at least until climate change renders cities uninhabitable and media careers unlikely. After all, novelists are often middle-class media professionals who live in London, and sometimes they sleep with people who aren’t their spouses.
And complaints about the adultery novel are almost as old as the adultery novel itself. “There are other [subjects],” Henry James wrote in 1899, “than those of the eternal triangle of the husband, the wife, and the lover.” He had been ploughing through a batch of recent French novels. What would he have made of Howard Jacobson’s latest? What Will Survive of Us is about Sam and Lily, who have an affair. Sam is “an arts-page celebrity” – that is, a vaguely Stoppardian playwright (his big hit is called Ibsen in Sorrento). Lily directs TV documentaries (“Though she doesn’t always work for the BBC, everything about her programmes suggests the BBC”). Sam is married to Selena. Lily cohabits sexlessly with Hal. Everyone lives, of course, in London.
