Adele by Leïla Slimani Review

Adele’s public life seems perfect: a journalist married to a doctor, mother to their three year old son, living the cosmopolitan life in Paris. Her private life though is bleak: a secret sex addict, she joylessly sleeps with any and almost every man she comes across, each degrading coupling becoming more desperate and unfulfilling. With no end in sight from her increasingly out-of-control behaviour, how long can she keep her private life from being exposed?

Like her previous novel Lullaby, Leila Slimani’s Adele has an intriguing premise that she unfortunately totally fails to deliver on. I kept reading this relatively short novel wondering where it was going - and the answer was nowhere! Not just plot-wise either (there isn’t one) but in terms of a point. Adele sleeps around, she’s depressed the whole time, and that’s it.

Ok, she’s an addict so that explains the compulsions and lack of satisfaction but it would have been appreciated if we had had a glimpse into what caused her to act this way. Slimani offers up scant details – she didn’t have the best childhood, though it wasn’t so bad and plenty of people don’t become sex addicts as a result of a shitty parent. So there’s no insight into how someone becomes this way and it doesn’t go anywhere or say anything which is just lazy, unimaginative writing.

I guess you could say it’s sort of making the point that women are objectified but that’s hardly a new idea and very banal. Slimani’s distant storytelling means she never judges Adele’s behaviour (girl power…?) but her weak impressionistic style makes for an unmemorable narrative, despite the salacious subject matter.

It’s well-written – it’s like a slightly more literary version of the porn-y novels that are so popular with many women – and it is morbidly interesting, if you see her behaviour as a reaction to the myriad existential issues we all deal with daily, albeit more extreme. Otherwise, Adele is an unremarkable and forgettable character portrait of a troubled person behaving incongruously for reasons nobody knows – as meaningless as all the sex Adele has!