Output details

The Adult

The Adult is narrated by Jim Thorne, a twenty-nine year old member of the Albright family. The novel combines family-saga and bildungsroman. Jim’s coming-of-age is explored in the context of the politics, history and popular culture of the period 1989 – 2009, from one UK economic recession to the next.

Both generations of the Albright family pursue artistic fame. Whereas Jim’s aunts are actors, Hollywood producers or opera singers, his own generation must pursue fame at a time when fame itself is transforming, into celebrity, and at a time when his late-capitalist, consumerist, putatively post-ideological society seems indestructible. As this new kind of celebrity undercuts the fame of his aunts, Jim and his cousin Jess and his sister Elaine seek to negotiate it successfully. In Jim’s mind, ideas merge; suicide bombers feel spiritually linked to the detonation of celebrities; as Manchester regenerates following the 1996 IRA bomb, Jim feels as transparent as the new glass skyscrapers, as crudely historicised as the converted mills of Ancoats and as productive as the buildings that stand derelict.

The research for the novel was greatly influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin. Firstly, eighteen months was spent searching for forgotten cultural artefacts - pop singles, photographs, stories - things that might, in Benjamin’s terms, “explode” conventional historicism's claim to transparency and teleological linearity and interrogate the notion of historical progress. Secondly, the “movement” of the novel, the radical shifts between paragraphs (to very different times or subject matter) owes a great deal to Stretch’s research into Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and specifically to Benjamin’s emphasis on montage as a less dictatorial mode of representation.