Why do smart women expect their lovers to leave their wives, despite overwhelming evidence that the contrary is more likely? Australian critic Madeleine Gray is the latest writer to explore this question, in an acutely witty debut that charts, in painful detail, the inexorable arc of an affair between a disaffected millennial and her older, married boss.
The story is not original. That’s the point. Other recent novels examining similar relationship dynamics include Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, Imogen Crimp’s A Very Nice Girl and Laura Warrell’s Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm. Yet Green Dot’s potency lies in its narrator’s distinctive voice, ruthless self-scrutiny and droll observations on the absurdities of young adult life. That narrator is Hera: 24, world-weary, hyperaware of every cliche attached to her situation, and its likely outcome. But when you really want someone, you go for it, she tells us, consequences be damned.
While her peers were starting careers, she postponed adulthood with three arts degrees. Now broke and living in Sydney with her father, she starts work as an online community moderator with all the enthusiasm of a woman going to the gallows. For Hera disdains corporate drudgery and finds her own participation in “the system” farcical.
A narrator doesn’t have to be likable, just compelling, and Hera filters her tale of obsessive desire through hindsight, chiding her misguided younger self. She’s right about the gap between the expectations set up by education and the stultifying reality of entry-level jobs. Gray brilliantly satirises the indignities of office life on the bottom rung: the rigid hierarchy, pettiness, empty gestures. Such conditions are clearly a petri dish for existential despair and sexual entanglements.
We follow Hera from instant-messenger flirtation to after-work drinks, from the untimely discovery that fortysomething Arthur is married to the decision to continue nonetheless. No one is more surprised by the force of her feelings than Hera, who identified as a lesbian before meeting Arthur and derives an illicit thrill from playing the role of a heterosexual girlfriend. Her vision tunnels until she can see only him – or the green dot that shows he’s online. It becomes increasingly uncomfortable to read about the sacrifices she makes for crumbs of his time and affection, as she clutches at the mirage of stability he represents.
Yet however discomfiting, their relationship is always convincing. Hera sees herself as a predator not a victim, and the reader must draw their own conclusions about the weight of Arthur’s seniority in the power balance between them. Where she is sassy, he is timid. She wears crop tops and Doc Martens; he cargo shorts and “chemist-bought sunglasses”. She has more chutzpah: “He looks at me, as he has so many times before, like I hold all the answers.” It is she who soothes his guilt, she who books the hotels. The bleakness is offset by the touching bonds and zippy dialogue between Hera and her best friends, who remain loyal despite her destructive choices, and with her father, a gay man who fought for custody of her.
The book is peppered with pop cultural allusions, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Black Books and Hera Lindsay Bird. This is literature of the digital era, honed on Twitter. Some sentences, freighted with subordinate clauses, feel effortful, but Gray has a parodist’s ear for the cadences, platitudes and jargon of modern speech, and a gift for bathos: “We have a job to do, after all, which is to colour-code profiles on a screen until we die.”
Although ironic and flippant, Green Dot avoids nihilism, and is ultimately about the search for meaning through love. It vividly illustrates how someone can lose their perspective, principles and dignity in its name, ignoring overwhelming evidence of the probable conclusion. “I understand why people blow up their lives,” declares Hera. “If the choice is this or not this, I will destroy everything else every time.”
• Green Dot by Madeleine Gray is published by W&N (£18.99) in the UK and Allen & Unwin ($32.99) in Australia. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
