Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda, review

A Dutch debut that bears comparison with Franzen and Roth

Peter Buwalda, whose debut novel is 'Bonita Avenue'
Peter Buwalda, whose debut novel is 'Bonita Avenue' Credit: Photo: Mikel Buwalda

Peter Buwalda is a Dutch journalist and his debut novel is one wild ride: a swirling helix of a family saga that swerves from gross-out sex comedy to pitch-black revenge tragedy as twist after twist reframes what we know about its dysfunctional cast.

Key to the manic plot is former judo champion and charismatic maths professor Siem Sigerius. When one of his students breaks off an affair because he won’t leave his wife, Sigerius turns for comfort to online pornography. Only too late does he realise that the star of his favourite website is his own stepdaughter, Joni. That would be enough of a story for most novels, but here it’s just the start: the drama skyrockets after a government shake-up makes him a candidate for education secretary – and blackmail.

These events are told in retrospect, at first from the point of view of Joni’s schizophrenic ex-boyfriend Aaron, a photographer pinging heartbroken emails across the Atlantic to Joni, who is now a mother and porn baron in Los Angeles. Of all the characters only Joni gets to tell her own story, with the effect that Aaron and Sigerius’s jealous claims on her look clueless.

The gonzo scenario keeps the novel buzzing on a steady current of shock and shame. At two points the plot turns on men caught pants-down with women’s fashion accessories in hand, which might be one reason why Buwalda makes Sigerius an expert on probability. A cut-up time scheme leaves storylines dangling for hundreds of pages without turning the novel into a guessing game – there are too many threads for any single known unknown to dominate.

Buwalda finds a backdrop in real events, including an explosion at a fireworks depot that caused hundreds of casualties in Enschede in 2000. An epigraph from porn actress Sasha Grey tips the wink that one character is her in all but name. So I’d guess some of Bonita Avenue’s import must whoosh over the head of a foreign reader; does it target a Dutch Michael Gove? I can’t say, but it didn’t trouble my enjoyment of a new writer as toe-curling as early Roth, as roomy as Franzen and as caustic as Houellebecq. Don’t let me forget to mention Jonathan Reeder’s note-perfect English translation.