Everywhere were new dads, lost and incapable. ‘That I had failed as a father and a husband seemed certain until I saw myself in the wider context of other men on the postnatal ward. The problem with Ray is that trouble and strife and all things not so nice seem to gravitate towards him or is it he that gravitates to them? Ray is at the midway point of his life, he’s in crisis mode, his wife is pregnant, he has a job he hates but it pays the bills, he has feelings of doubt, feelings of regret and he’s developed a knack of everything that he tries to do seems to take him further down the rabbit hole that is the gutter of his life. ‘ The Adulterants’ follows the life of Ray, who as the back-cover states ‘ is not a bad guy’. ‘Her violin is worth more than this house,’ he’d said, ‘and she carries it around in a soft case – terrifying!’ People who have loads of money love to talk about people who have even more, in order to try on the costume of poverty.’ My father had whispered the figure to us when he showed us to our room. ‘June’s violin was not even a Stradivarius and still it was insured for one and a half million dollars.

His sentence structure is striking, often leaving me exclaiming to myself at how amazing his last line was or how great his grasp of the language is.

Dunthorne is what I would call a true wordsmith. The true beauty of this book is that it explores what it’s like to be fallible, isn’t that something we all can relate to to be at a crossroads in your life and coming to terms that life isn’t all you thought it would be.ĭunthorne, like the great Baroque painter’s Caravaggio and Rembrandt’s attention to detail is second to none Dunthorn weaves his pen in great masterstrokes that are subtle but when noticed transform the ordinary into what I could only describe as extraordinary. His prose is relaxed but complex, easy to the eye but hard on the heart. What Joe Dunthorne has achieve with ‘ The Adulterants’ is something quite special, something that many writers could learn a thing or two from that, my friends is how to tell a good story. Adulterate – render (something) poorer in quality by adding another substance. Adulterant – Noun – Plural Noun: adulterants – a substance used to adulterate another.

Joe dunthorne the adulterants