"The Escape" is a 2009 novel by British author Adam Thirlwell, describing the quest of a retired banker to regain his family's appropriated villa in an unnamed formerly communist country somewhere in the Alps. While there he remembers his life, muses to himself, and engages in some tawdry sexual behavior.
I was about twenty pages or so into this book before I realized I would not enjoy it. It is a combination of the banal and pretentious, describing the textureless life of a bourgeois in a way that I can't guess at the aim of. Is this book meant to shock? To mock? Is this meant to be a slice of life? Are we still unmasking the dark underbelly of society in 2009? Or making comments on the arbitariness of life? I couldn't even guess what clichéd point the author was trying to make. A small part of me can hold out the hope that I got this wrong and there was some transcendent point behind it all. But mostly I was bored by the book, despite occasional flashes of sympathy for the protagonist. Mostly I wondered if people really lived like that, and if Europeans really still smoked cigarettes that casually. I also wonder how prose that might have been cut by the editor of a White Wolf novel makes it into serious business literary fiction.
Canine, Bacchic, Haffner thrived on the lower thrills: the women with their marine and sour aroma, the rotting rich smell of powdered roe, the ammonia rinds of cheese.
It is just surprising to me that a writer writing in
2009 would use the issue of women's vaginal smells as a metaphor for the hidden underbelly of sensuality beating within the formal world of Europe. Or whatever he is getting into. I just don't get it.
So why did I continue to read this book? The answer is simple. I realized that as an ironic reader, I had to challenge myself. Recently, from Dollar Tree, I purchased Mr. T #1, a predictably ironic read. But what type of ironist am I if I am reading a Mr. T comic book? And that is why I continued to read "The Escape". Also of Dollar Tree provenance, I considered spending several days reading a pretentious novel about the lives of eurotrash to be a challenge to my skills. And while it was sometimes a strain, a strain I had to escape from by reading Lisi Harrison's novel The Clique, I persevered. And I am proud to say that upon finishing a book where the main character reaches an epiphany into the transience of existence and the limitations of identity from a young waitress probing him anally with a candle, I have reached a new level as a satirical ninja that it is hard to communicate to those who did not undergo this test.
Below, find this book's cataloging and publishing information.
1. Older Men-Sexual behavior-Fiction
2. Adultery-Fiction
3. Inheritance and succession-Fiction
4. Alps Region-Fiction
Adam Thirlwell
2009
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
978-0-374-14878-2