Malcolm Knox is a respected literary editor and journalist, known to many for his Walkley Award winning exposé of the fraudulent literary memoir of Norma Khouri. In addition to his achievements in non-fiction, he is an esteemed writer of fiction, drawing praise and prizes for the novels A Private Man and Jamaica. Knox’s fifth novel, The Wonder Lover, will further the author’s already considerable reputation, especially as a dauntless explorer of the inner lives ofmen. The story proceeds from a compact premise: an insipid, outwardly unremarkable man keeps three separate wives, and fathers three separate sets of children across three continents. Effectively archetypal in its rendering of the central characters, the novel offsets its mechanical fabula through the peripheral, spectral narration of the children; here is the fluid, first person plural ‘we’ which we see used to increasing effect in contemporary fiction. It all amounts to a potent mix, an archetypal play that marries journalistic rigour with novelistic drifts, allusions and snares.

What is the worst thing that can happen to a man who has three wives? He falls in love. Readers of Nabokov and Martin Amis will recognise the parodic legacy of men humiliated by love in Knox’s work. The Wonder Lover is alert to the generic markers of the romantic experience: men in love are in trouble because they suddenly find themselves written into the romance genre. Brilliant in its excavations of this literary and cultural inheritance, the novel boldly takes down its anti-hero and throws into play the question of the authenticity of love. To what extent is this most personal of experiences generic, standardised and reproducible; does this type of desire in fact gain authenticity precisely through its standardisation? It’s an old question that has never gone away, but Knox drills down in it, delivering a bright and unsettling gem.

Lucy Van is a freelance reviewer.