Politics: A Novel » (Bargain)

Adam Thirlwell was born in 1978, and grew up in North London. He was placed on Granta's 2003 list of Best Young British Writers under forty. He is assistant editor of the literary magazine Areté, and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Politics is his first novel.

Politics is about: a) a threesome; b) politics

Moshe loves Nana. But love can be difficult — especially if you want to be kind. And Moshe and Nana want to be kind to someone else.

They want to be kind to their best friend, Anjali.

Politics explores crucial problems of sexual etiquette. What should the sleeping arrangements be in a ménage-à-trois? Is it polite to read while two people have sex beside you? Is it permissible to be jealous?

The New Yorker

In this début novel, sedulous dissection of a love affair involving a pair of young Londoners—who, with the addition of a female friend, become a threesome—serves as an occasion for playing with the old saw about the personal being political. Thirlwell, attempting to chart some sort of moral-aesthetic triangle bounded by Kurt Vonnegut, Martin Amis, and Milan Kundera, declares, “a threesome is the ultimate sexual unit. It is the socialist utopia of sex.” The author makes enjoyable sport of the contemporary taste for porno-chic transgression, but, in repeatedly halting the narrative to liken his characters’ callow problems, hesitancies, and dilemmas to episodes in the lives of Stalin, Mao, and Vaclav Havel, he sacrifices narrative engagement to the display of his own virtuosity.