Joe Dunthorne’s ‘Wild Abandon’: Mixing sweet absurdity with dysfunction
Philip Larkin's bitter poem about the influence of our parents — "They [mess] you up, your mum and dad" — could be the epigraph of Joe Dunthorne's second novel, "Wild Abandon." But Dunthorne marinates dysfunction in sweet absurdity to produce a wry comedy, the latest addition to that black-sheep genre known as Quirky Families. You've seen these people: They're staples of indie films such as "Little Miss Sunshine" or novels such as Kevin Wilson's recent "The Family Fang." In such stories, psychological abuse or parental neglect that should poison precocious children is somehow ameliorated by affection and irony. On good days, that strikes me as a perfectly realistic view, and Dunthorne is one of its wittiest proponents. His first novel, "Submarine" (2008), was enthusiastically compared to "The Catcher in the Rye" and attracted even more attention when Richard Ayoade'smovie adaptation was released last year.
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