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In Adelaide, the debut novel by Genevieve Wheeler, a vivacious American woman living in London (the eponymous Adelaide) falls head over heels for the enigmatic Rory Hughes. By turns charming and distant, Rory entrances her, and the two fall into a whirlwind romance that never seems on solid ground. When tragedy strikes, the cracks only deepen – and when things fall apart, Adelaide does too.
Wheeler’s novel traces the progression of a romance that at times seems too good to be true, at others bewilderingly futile. Adelaide is besotted with the flaky and inconsistent Rory, whose allure is obvious but whose commitment seems less so.
The novel sets out to explore why a woman might spend so long in a relationship that seems at times profoundly unsatisfying – one where “her emotional security seemed to be an afterthought for him”.
It is being labelled as part of a trend for “sad girl novels”. This rising genre brings together a long tradition of women’s literary fiction that trades in melancholy, introspection and emotional nuance (think Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison) with the romance genre’s attention to the harms and appeals of intense liaisons. These novels tend to have a particularly modern emphasis on diagnostically labelled mental illness or trauma.
I research narratives and experiences of mental illness, so I’m interested to see the ways that contemporary novelists take up these themes. Unfortunately, I found Wheeler’s novel never imparted the insight it seeks, as both Rory’s charm and Adelaide’s infatuation failed to fully land with me.
The novel is keen to describe its characters’ emotions, telling the reader about Adelaide’s “feelings of inadequacy” and that she was “tired and lovestruck”. But for me, the writing never conveyed them with any depth, leaving the reader always at a distance.
Adelaide is being advertised as “perfect for fans of Normal People”. Sally Rooney’s reputation is perhaps one that no one should have to live up to – but unfortunately, I found Rooney’s skill for communicating the subtleties of feeling, relation and entanglement largely absent from this novel.
The lack of narrative propulsion doesn’t help – there are only one or two events of narrative significance. Beyond these, the book is filled with an endless parade of pretty locations and delicious food. Characters flit from the Fitzroy Tavern to the Parlour at Fortnum & Mason, from “a syrupy cocktail” to “a carafe of Frascati”, from Palma’s “topaz” waters to “a sculpture garden in Surrey”. It quickly comes to feel less like a novel and more like a 400-page Instagram reel.
Read more: How Sally Rooney came to be dubbed the ‘voice of a generation’
The ‘recovery’ genre
The novel’s attempt at establishing character is similarly superficial. Wheeler presents Adelaide as literary, but not by demonstrating any reflection on, or engagement with, books and their meaning. The main character references The Little Prince, Call Me By Your Name, Beloved and Les Misérables, but without any hint that she comprehends what’s inside them.
The novel attempts to establish the stakes of its plot by bookending the romance with Adelaide’s mental breakdown, signified by her checking herself in to A&E with suicidal thoughts. Yet this incident feels as sanitised as the rest of the novel. Suicidal ideation is presented as something to be straightforwardly resolved with a diagnosis and a prescription.
Like many novels in the “recovery narrative” genre, it also airbrushes the reality of mental health treatment in the UK. There’s no mention of the chronic understaffing, interminable waiting lists, or recurrent lack of sympathy or sensitivity from healthcare professionals. Adelaide’s reflections on her attempt to end her life are limited to generalisations about a “darkness” that’s always “lingering at the periphery”; about “building a staircase” of recovery and “trying to piece myself back together”.
The tragedy at the heart of the novel could have sparked some interesting reflections on why and how we can come to feel strongly about events that are desperately sad, yet have little direct effect on our lives – the death of a near-stranger, for instance. In our celebrity-obsessed, 24-hour news-cycle world, this topic has never been more relevant. Yet where reflection might be, we find vapid validation that “pain is pain”.
In the end, Adelaide amounts to little more than a book-length lifestyle advert. It all looks very pleasant, but the substance beneath the style simply isn’t there.
If you would like more information about some of the issues raised in this article, you may find this list of resources helpful.
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Veronica Heney receives funding from The Wellcome Trust, Wellcome grant 226798/Z/22/Z . She is affiliated with Make Space, where she is co-founder and research lead.
