SOURCE: “Prisons of Desire,” in New Statesman, December 11, 1998, pp. 46–47.

In the following review, Walden offers a positive assessment of Adultery and Other Diversions.

“One admires those books,” writes Tim Parks, “whose complexity of content and vision gets closest to the grain of experience.” Hardly original, perhaps, yet the sentiment bears repeating. The grain of experience is of necessity irregular, yet a lot of contemporary writing suffers from an excess of self-regulation, as authors do their best to prove themselves regular guys. So the grain of experience is smoothed or polished away, as truth becomes gunged with sentiment, larded with the humour of evasion, or sweetened with moral politeness till it rots your teeth. In Parks there is irregularity aplenty and the grain is rough. “Job and marriage are our two greatest prisons … clearly it is very exciting when you start destroying everything … I could never feel as much...