No one knows anything and no one beyond the protagonist has any consciousness in Lurid & Cute. It’s the sort of book whose good reviews make one learn to distrust good reviews. The book is not bad. It just sort is, as if someone hoovered up the thoughts of a bright but unambitious hipster and failed to organize them adequately. The narrator isn’t as intellectually associative as someone like Roland Barthes or Camille Paglia, whose styles can sometimes be forgiven for their insights.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I’ve been unable to sell Lurid & Cute on Amazon, where repeated price drops get matched by bots with excess inventory. Sometimes the market speaks and it’s wrong; other times, it speaks and it’s right. The novel starts cleverly:

I liked the bright vibe. But also I knew that although I liked the vibe it was not the vibe of my usual bedroom, just as the girl who was sleeping beside me in what seemed to be a hotel room was not my happy wife. It was that kind of problem situation, and while I acknowledge that some people would not feel that this is after all so bad – and that waking beside a person who is not ethically your own is just the usual way most humans enter the moral realm and therefore, kiddo, live with it – still, I could not be so suave.

But it goes nowhere, albeit in a way that’s hard to describe. The preceding sentences are representative: Thirlwell or his narrator is fond of length, and if you too are fond of length and of digression loosely related to whatever is kind of at hand, you may like it too. The style is often simultaneously too normal and too weird: “The entire history of my wasted time seemed sad to me, like it turned out to be a menace where no menace seemed to be visible, and I berated myself that, vigilant as I always was for signs of menace, I had not noticed that the true menace was right there [. . . ]” The book seems to offer itself as an example of wasted time, too, on par with the YouTube videos mentioned on page 22, but maybe its point is that time wasted and time well-spent are similar. Or more likely the point is the lack of a point, in which case there better be a great story in there. There isn’t here.

Try Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back instead. That novel stays with me long after I finished. It’s a novel about struggle that’s not a struggle to read, a novel indirectly about politics that doesn’t slap readers in the face with politics, a novel about sex as it’s had now without being polemical. There’s so much there and so little in Lurid & Cute.