Madeleine Gray’s debut novel Green Dot arrived littered with positive endorsements, rave reviews and the promise of film and television adaptations lined up before it had even been released. There’s a lot to love about this novel, which follows 24-year-old Hera as she tries to find meaning and connection, and takes a job as a comment moderator at a news website because of the “interior that it allows [her] access to, the vantage point it facilitates”.
This vantage point, as it turns out, offers less access into the interior lives of others than Hera has hoped, and she turns her attention across the newsroom to Arthur, an older journalist who represents the comfort and stability she perceives as markers of adulthood: “I was intoxicated by the promise of ordinary happiness implied by his cargo shorts, by his chemist-bought sunglasses. I was besotted with the way he combined a high-powered job with the nervous shyness of someone who was bullied in primary school and has since taken on knowing timidity as an endearing personality trait. My god, how I wanted him.”
Hera reads like a gen Z Bridget Jones – endearingly messy and a little bit lost. When she starts sleeping with Arthur, it makes her feel something – it’s love, although that’s not really the point – for the first time in a long time. The thing that makes Hera so besotted, so willing to continue their relationship even after she discovers Arthur is married (and hopelessly unable to treat her with any kind of respect), is the depth of her feelings, a stark contrast to the passive cynicism she displays for the rest of her life.
Unlike Bridget, Hera displays a level of ironic self-awareness that gives her a sense of agency. She chooses Arthur, even though his behaviour is cowardly at best. She chooses him because being with him allows Hera to embrace a part of herself she feels unable to embrace alone, “the part that delights in the world”. Hera’s relationship with Arthur is a stand-in for all the bad choices, the shameful desires, the easy outs. She’s a protagonist who has come of age in a world where everyone knows better, but who longs for a picket-fence happy ending nonetheless.
Hera’s snark is fresh and compelling, and her voice carries the novel. She’s a quintessential twentysomething whose unfiltered commentary and self-examination is in line with the sardonic self-reflection of the meme generation. She’s boldly unafraid of drawing attention, and her brashness is so at odds with her internal anxiety and chronic overthink that it’s hard not to relate, or at least deeply empathise, with her. Her refusal to be tamped down by social norms and expectations is funny, ambitious and infuriating all at once.
But despite these many enjoyable aspects of Green Dot, there’s something unsatisfying about the way Hera accepts her life’s lack of momentum. The way the book reflects critically on issues of disconnection, anxiety and economic instability, and the irreconcilable relationship between success and happiness, are all incredibly timely themes, but much of this is left unresolved. This doesn’t feel accidental. Perhaps Hera’s refusal to participate in the grim, circular economy of work, success and despair makes her a hero of our depressing times. But beneath the novel’s humour and sass lies an incredibly bleak worldview that feels at odds with the novel’s lighthearted tone and romcom trappings.
Hera is desperate for connection but so passive and so committed to her role as the outsider that even her desire to love and be loved is tainted by the jaded way she approaches her relationships with other people. Ultimately, her belief that she doesn’t know how to be in her “own body, [her] own mind” is reinforced.
Green Dot is a contemporary novel that absolutely grabs at this precise window in time, the vernacular, humour and cultural setting all coming together. Gray writes with a quick wit and a lot of charm. But while Hera is mercilessly authentic and often hilarious in her insecurities, she is also frustratingly stuck in them – and remains so even at the novel’s end.
• Green Dot by Madeleine Gray is published by Allen & Unwin in Australia ($32.99). It will be published in the UK on 1 February (W&N)
