Green Dot by Madeleine Gray

First published in Australia in 2023; published by Henry Holt and Co. on February 27, 2024

The green dot in the title of this novel is the indicator on Instagram that your lover is online. The dot is “staring at you like an eye you can’t see yourself reflected in” and is thus less satisfying than your lover’s actual eyes.

In its early pages, Green Dot is very funny. The humor slowly transitions to drama that is foreshadowed by the narrator’s warning that her audience will ask how she could have been such a fool.

Hera Stephen lives in Sydney. She has no STEM ability but she’s bright, so she views her options as lawyer, journalist, or academic. She loves to learn but has no passion for working. School has taught her that she should be concerned about her formation and development, but spending her days working in a job seems to have little relationship to those goals.

Hera buys her freedom by taking out student loans and earning degrees. The strategy works until she has earned all the degrees that lenders will fund. Hera is living with her father and needs to find work so she can make loan payments.

At the age of 24, Hera finds a position as an online community moderator. The job allows Madeleine Gray to poke fun at internet trolls, content moderation, and office work. While content moderators are rigidly separated from the journalists in her office, Hera finds that a content moderator can get invited to office drinks after work with the journalists by being “young, smart-mouthed, female, reasonably big-titted, with no avowed journalist aspirations of your own.”

Hera befriends fellow content moderator Mei Ling, who is her ally against a universally disliked supervisor. Their snarky message exchanges using the office intranet add to the novel’s humor. Hera also has friends from her student days. Soph, the most amusing of them, “is smart and mostly motivated by vendettas.” She likes to gossip and is encouraging Hera to try having sex with a man (Hera having mostly confined her sex life to women).

When Hera starts to flirt with Arthur, a British journalist who works in her office, Soph encourages her to shag him. Hera accepts the challenge and begins an affair. This is the point at which the story moves from humor to drama. I was disappointed that the humor nearly disappears at that point because the humor is sharp and more enjoyable than Hera’s love life.

The domestic drama of Hera’s affair runs a predictable course. Hera tells the reader at an early point that her story would be predictable and at the end says, “You were right. You predicted it. Everyone was right but me.” Notwithstanding the absence of surprise, the story is emotionally affecting, as Arthur makes promises about leaving his wife but repeatedly explains why the time isn’t right (his wife’s pregnancy is one such excuse). Hera ends it and moves to England, continues to interact with Arthur via Instagram, moves back to Sydney during COVID, and suffers mightily as the story moves to its inevitable end.

Hera’s fantasies about becoming Arthur’s wife and raising his baby as a stepmom might make the reader question Hera’s intelligence, but she is clearly a bright woman who simply has no control over her feelings — or, more importantly, over her response to her feelings. I often feel frustrated with stories about characters who allow their lives to become soap opera plots, but the novel’s initial humor drew me into Hera’s personality and made me sympathize with her when her life falls apart. In the end, Hera manages to learn something about herself and about life — she develops as a person, as she was told she should do in school — and that development suggests a possibility of growth that makes the predictable story worthwhile.

RECOMMENDED

Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

First published in Australia in 1977; published by Pantheon on February 20, 2024

Monkey Grip is regarded as a classic of Australian literature, the first novel of one of the nation’s most celebrated writers. I wouldn't say it has aged well.

The novel is narrated by Nora, a woman in her early thirties living in Melbourne in 1975. Nora has a daughter named Gracie, the product of her failed marriage, although Gracie plays a relatively small role in the novel (and seemingly in Nora’s life).

Nora is in love with a junky named Javo. Nora spends half the novel telling the reader how much she loves Javo. She spends the other half telling the reader how miserable Javo makes her. Love and misery often share the same paragraph.

Nora is a mess. She regularly does coke and acid. While she manages to hold a job and raise a daughter (activities that seem to happen in the background of her life), she’s hardly in a position to complain that Javo spends his dole money on heroin. She sleeps with other men but is jealous when other women show an interest in Javo. She breaks up with Javo and then pines for him. She takes him back and returns to a state of misery. Repeat and repeat and repeat.

One might think that heroin is the problem since Javo is by all accounts a likeable dude, but when Javo gets cleaned up for a period of time, Nora is even more upset with him because he doesn’t seem to need her as much as he does when he’s high. In fact, he starts sleeping with a different woman when he’s straight, which is definitely a bad sign for his relationship with Nora. Nora nevertheless seems to be his favorite partner, perhaps because she keeps her eyes open when they screw.

Javo shags an impressive number of women for an addict who steals from his friends when his money runs out. Nora seems willing to sleep with anyone who asks but she has fewer partners than Javo. Sometimes Gerald joins Nora in bed but, for ambiguous reasons, he won’t always shag her. This is not great for Nora’s self-esteem since he seems to have a sexual interest in other women.

Nora’s life is made messier by the domestic drama that surrounds it. A reader might need a spread sheet to keep track of who is shagging whom in this domestic drama. Nora’s friend Rita seems interested in messing around with Javo, and then with the boyfriend of Nora’s friend Angela. This gives Nora and Angela an excuse to be catty about Rita’s overall sluttiness. Rita’s regular boyfriend is Nick but he’s another junky. At some point I stopped trying to keep track of the characters, most of whom exist only to give main characters something to gossip about.

The men in the novel are all losers but what does that say about the women who desire them? That might be the question that animates Monkey Grip. Nora becomes “dried out with loneliness” if a guy isn’t making her wet. Nora clearly uses men for sex (which isn’t a problem since they are happy to be used), but she’s a bit of a hypocrite when she accuses Javo of using her for sex. She only seems to be happy when he’s shagging her, so what’s the problem?

Nora at least has some self-awareness. She understands her insecurities even if she does little to conquer them. She wonders “why I always need a man to be concerned with, whether well or ill.” She wonders why she is afraid to be alone. She wonders why she comforts herself by picking out the least attractive characteristics of women who share an interest in the men in her life. She wonders why she can’t screw the same person in a committed relationship for more than a couple of years before losing interest in the sex. She realizes that she is not a kind person and that her personality makes her unhappy. “So change yourself,” a reader might think, but Nora — like most people — is better at identifying faults than addressing them.

Perhaps my reaction to Monkey Grip is too judgmental. After all, Nora is living in a different age and culture than twenty-first century America. She rarely tells men what she’s really feeling because she’s been conditioned to obey “some unwritten law, blood-deep” that prevents women from being honest when they feel emotional pain. Nora has embraced the sexual revolution but notions of gender equality that are central to modern feminism have not empowered her. That’s probably not her fault as she likely hasn’t been exposed to those ideas.

So maybe I’m being too harsh, but I was more annoyed by Nora than sympathetic to her plight. Perhaps I should have been enlightened by Nora’s reaction to the emotional burden of loving a man who makes her life so difficult, but I just wanted her to come to her senses. Monkey Grip has interesting moments, but I might have enjoyed it for its shock value in 1977. Today, it feels dated.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Plastic by Scott Guild

Published by Pantheon on February 13, 2024

Sometimes, after the fifth or sixth time I’ve said to myself “I’m not sure I like this book,” I stop reading it. I persevered with Plastic. A mix of engaging moments and wtf moments convinced me that my continued attention was warranted, but in the end, my reaction remains: I’m not sure I like this book.

Erin seems to be living in a television show, or perhaps she views her life that way. Chapters start with “In this scene,” followed by a description of Erin’s activities, presumably narrated by Erin. She watches a popular television show (Nuclear Family, a show about post-apocalyptic teen angst in which some of the characters are waffles or robots) and talks to friends about their membership in the Church of Divine Acceptance, a pseudo-religion that equates faith with technology (“No God or weird stuff there.”).

Conjugations of “to be” and other bits of conventional sentence structure have disappeared in Erin’s post-apocalyptic world (“How Owen doing? He back home now?” is answered “He just get out hospital”), although Erin speaks fluidly when she narrates her life. The language change seems odd given that kids still play Marco Polo (words that seem more likely to disappear than “is” and “of”). But the kids are made of plastic, so any additional oddness is comparatively easy to accept.

Ah yes, the plastic. Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier. Erin and her friends are plastic “figurines.” Maybe they only feel like they are plastic (a final scene suggests they might really have skin made of flesh), although they repair injuries to their bodies with Wound Glue. They seem human in most other respects, including the pleasure they take in alcohol, drugs, and sex. Erin sometimes orders a Hot Date when she wants to get laid, although her Smartbody can give her an equivalent experience with a virtual hookup.

Erin spent her inheritance on a Smartbody to help her avoid the reality of terrorism, global warming (the “heat leap”) caused by burning chicken bones as fuel, and the aftermath of a nuclear conflict. She escapes into a virtual reality called Smartworld.

Erin uses virtual reality to recreate Patrick, who died in front of her in a high school terrorism incident. She even gives herself a virtual pregnancy until she becomes angry and clicks the menu for a virtual abortion. Later in the story, Erin will develop a relationship with Jacob, a blind figurine.

Erin’s sister disappeared a terrorist bombing. Her father died of Brad Pitt disease (and perhaps of a broken heart after his boyfriend left him). In the virtual world, Erin receives unwanted warnings that caution her to avoid terrorist attacks. She suspects she knows the source of the warnings but doesn’t want to confirm her suspicions. On the other hand, not reporting the warnings will have its own consequences, including (at the least) being placed on a watch list by the oppressive government that tries to keep everyone under constant surveillance. That’s easy when people spend most of their lives getting high and living in a virtual world.

My impression is that Scott Guild excelled in creative writing classes. Plastic is certainly creative, but the novel feels like a series of gimmicks — interesting gimmicks, to be sure — that never quite cohere into a whole that is equal to, much less greater than, the sum of its parts. I didn’t become absorbed in the reality that Guild built, perhaps because I never quite saw its point. The metaphor of people living plastic lives seems a bit obvious. Still, Plastic might encourage readers to see quasi-religion, the risks of totalitarian government, terrorism, virtual reality, and the other topics that animate the story in a new light. Barring that, the story has some entertainment value, even if it doesn’t promote emotional engagement with its plastic characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

First published in Great Britain in 2023; published by Scribner on February 6, 2024

Police detectives in the city of Cahokia work to solve a murder in Cahokia Jazz. Wikipedia, the repository of all knowledge, tells me that Cahokia, located across the Mississippi from the current site of St. Louis, was the first significant settlement in North America. The remaining mounds have been designated as an historic site. The city existed from 1050 to 1350, but the novel imagines that in 1922, it is a modern city populated by three segregated racial groups. The US is at war with Russia in the territory now known as Alaska. Against that background, Cahokia Jazz might best be described as a crime novel with literary aspirations set in the context of an alternate history.

In the eyes of some, the city founded by Aztec royalty is still ruled by Aztec royalty, although the native residents — Aztec by legend more than ancestry — were largely converted to Catholicism by a Jesuit priest. Native beliefs nevertheless shape policy. Private ownership of land is forbidden in Cahokia; land belongs to everyone. The Land Trust manages long-term leases of land to its tenants. Water and electricity are shared in the same way.

Frederick Hopper’s bloodied corpse is found on the rooftop of the Land Trust building. Hopper is a takata — a person of European ancestry. The two other prominent ethnic groups in Cahokia are takouma — with ancestry that is native to the continent, and taklousa — a person of African ancestry. A takouma word, written in blood on Hopper’s forehead, might be translated as a call for independence.

Two detectives are assigned to the case. Joe Barrow is a mix of takouma and taklousa. Phineas Drummond is takata. Hopper’s wife, representing the views of many takata, regards Barrow as a savage and will only speak to Drummond. Hopper was in the Klan, a popular organization in his home state of Ohio, before he moved to Cahokia. By the novel’s midpoint, the Klan will be leading an insurrection.

The story explains Barrow’s connection to Drummond, first as wounded soldiers who met in a hospital, then as partners in law enforcement. Barrow isn’t quite sure how he feels about Drummond. He appreciates Drummond’s willingness to see him as an equal (an unusual trait among the takata) but doesn’t admire the man’s personal qualities. Drummond is being paid off by bootleggers and has a taste for hookers. Thanks to his connections, Drummond has developed an addiction to amphetamines, well before amphetamines will be marketed by pharmaceutical companies. By the novel’s midway point, it appears that Drummond has fully betrayed his already shaky allegiance to law and order. He certainly doesn’t seem keen on solving Hopper’s murder.

A journalist brings Barrow to the attention of the Man of the Sun, a leader in the Aztec tradition. Barrow describes the Man as “the lord high wizard to the takouma” but he seems pretty much like every other religious/political leader. The Man refers to Barrow as “Thrown-Away Boy,” a phrase from an Aztec myth that is uncomfortably descriptive of Barrow’s childhood.

The Man’s niece, Couma Hashi, presides over the House of the Moon. Barrow meets Couma in the course of his investigation and is quite taken with her, although he realizes she is out of his league. Barrow will eventually find himself in a shootout, protecting Couma from political assassins.

The word painted on Hopper’s head is popular with the Warriors, a group that uses graffiti to support Aztec independence. Barrow’s prime suspect soon becomes a Warrior who believes in the Aztec tradition of blood sacrifice, although the modern version of the sacrifice is performed on rats. On the other hand, as a takouma suggests to Barrow, Hopper’s murder might be an “attempt to whip up takata against takouma.” Barrow will wonder whether that might be the case when he is literally caught between two angry racial groups as they march toward each other.

Cahokia Jazz is a story of death and sacrifice, politics and power, but it also tells the story of Barrow’s personal journey as he struggles to give a meaningful shape to his life. Elements of an action novel keep the story moving, but a subplot of unrequited love adds depth to Barrow’s character. His love is about as realistic as my dream of being Sandra Bullock’s boyfriend, but sometimes dreams come true. Will Barrow’s love be his downfall?

Much of the novel’s tension comes from the alternate futures that Barrow can imagine for himself and the uncertainty of the choice he will make. He becomes something of a hero before the novel ends, but events tempt him to abandon law enforcement and pursue his true love — playing piano in a jazz band. The jazz performance scenes capture the creative magic of musicians at work.

I admire the research and creative reflection on “what might have been” that animates Cahokia Jazz. World-building can be essential to the credibility of speculative fiction. Francis Spufford’s city-building is masterful. Drummond knows every speakeasy and house of ill repute; Barrow knows the jazz clubs. The novel’s political background has the racially pure FBI chasing everyone suspected of being a communist sympathizer, which of course includes union organizers. Loan sharks are among the mobsters who add to the 1920s vibe.

Cahokia Jazz is an ambitious novel. To realize its ambitions, the lengthy story lags as its various elements catch up with each other. Still, Spufford always maintained my interest in the story’s multiple threads. While Cahokia Jazz has obvious parallels to modern America’s racial and political division, the novel blends politics with action and mystery. The story’s ending forces Barrow to make a difficult choice, one that involves sacrifice and the death of a friendship. The novel ultimately succeeds because of Barrow’s complicated story, the kind of story that is simultaneously sad, heartwarming, and inspirational.

RECOMMENDED

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller

First published in the UK in 2023; published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 30, 2024

The marketing of Prima Facie gives the impression that it is a legal thriller, but the impression is false. This is an agenda-driven novel. I have no quarrel with the agenda and I have no problem with using a novel to make a point if the writer honors the elements of successful fiction. Disguising an essay as a novel usually results in an uninteresting novel. That’s certainly true here.

Tessa Ensler is a barrister who is extraordinarily pleased with her cross-examination skills. Unfortunately, Suzie Miller writes courtroom scenes in the abstract. She rarely treats the reader to actual cross-examinations, opting to have Tessa boast of her technique without revealing the questions she is asking. Miller makes no effort to deliver the suspense that good cross-examination scenes generate.

Instead of following the traditional path of a courtroom thriller, the book focuses on Tessa’s personal experience as a crime victim and the impact of crime on her life and career. It’s fine that Miller didn’t write a legal thriller. She can write any book she wants. Unfortunately, the book she wrote isn’t interesting.

The novel is written in two parts. Both halves travel between the past and present. In the first half, the past focuses on the circumstances of Tessa’s acceptance into a prestigious law school. It’s a typical story of a working-class girl transitioning into a life where her contemporaries are posh. In the present, Tessa is pleased with herself because she regards herself as a masterful barrister. She enjoys flirting with posh Julian and enjoys even more his admiring comments. Before the first third of the novel has gone by, Tessa is feeling even better about herself because she shagged Julian on the couch in his office. When she actually goes on a date with Julian, however, they have wonderful drunken sex, Tessa wakes up and vomits, Julian wakes up and wants round two, and when Tessa declines he rapes her.

In the novel’s second half, the past focuses on Tessa’s report of her rape to the police and the present begins with her testimony in Julian's criminal trial. The then-and-now format slows the pace of a story in which only the now is interesting. I kept wanting Tessa to get on with the trial, but her trial narrative is constantly interrupted by flashbacks that the reader will recognize from countless similar stories. Tessa sees Julian at work, Julian seems perfectly normal and acts as if their encounter was insignificant, the police interview Julian and Tessa’s life at work becomes unbearable. Why frequent interruptions of the trial were necessary to flesh out the recent past is unclear to me. I’d chalk it up to deciding upon a trendy literary technique that wasn’t well executed, rather than sticking to a linear story. If the intent was to build suspense by delaying trial scenes, the technique instead caused all suspense to evaporate.

When Miller finally has Tessa on the witness stand, Tessa spends most of her time explaining her thoughts between questions. She has so many thoughts the jury must have wondered why it took her so long to answer. When she finally answers, almost always with a fluster, the answer is followed by an internal monologue questioning why she didn’t give a better answer. I understand that trial witnesses second-guess themselves, but all the fretting about answers — and I mean every answer, even those she has rehearsed with the prosecuting barrister —destroys the flow of direct and cross-examination that might have made the trial interesting. We are treated instead to an insecure witness who forgets her training as a barrister and seems incapable of clear thought.

Now, I get it. Miller wanted to bring home the trauma of testifying in a trial after being victimized. The reader can understand that trauma without having Tessa constantly telling us how traumatized she feels. To this reader’s dismay, Miller disregards the rule that advises writers to show, not tell.

Prima Facie is a well-intentioned but somewhat misleading indictment of the failure to secure more sexual assault convictions in England. A prosecutor repeatedly tells Tessa that the conviction rate in sexual assaults is very low. Dig into the statistics, and you’ll learn that the conviction rate of reported rapes is low because (for whatever reason) the complaining witness decides not to pursue the case before it goes to trial. Tessa wants her case to go to trial, so the overall conviction rate doesn’t apply to her case. She claims the conviction rate of cases that go to trial is 1.3%, but that’s just not true. The unsourced statistic pops up in the press, but it is an estimate of the percentage of rapes (not just those that go to trial or even those that are reported) that end with convictions. When charges go to trial in England, the conviction rate is somewhere around 75%, only a bit less than the 81% conviction rate for all crimes. Again, I have no quarrel with pursuing an agenda — it’s quite likely that the British system of justice does not serve rape victims well — but a writer who pursues an agenda loses credibility when she makes her point with inaccurate assertions of fact.

Tessa tells us about the psychological impact that the rape had on her, but again does more telling than showing. Miller makes the same error when Tessa describes a painful sexual assault exam as well as interviews with the police that (she tells us) leave Tessa feeling humiliated. The scenes feel like more like textbook accounts of rape and its aftermath as they are presented in social work literature, not as the first-person experience of a rape victim. I had the same impression when Tessa describes a failed rape attempt during her teen years. The narrative wants to make a point about feelings of powerlessness and shame experienced by rape victims, but Miller doesn't make the reader feel Tessa's pain.

When Tessa makes her complaint to the police, she suddenly feels it is unfair that the prosecution must prove the truth of her accusation while Julian is presumed innocent. I understand that becoming a victim might spark a change of perspective, but I have difficulty believing that a trained and experienced barrister would suddenly forget why all the rights she devoted her career to protecting are important. The story made me wonder whether Tessa was ever serious about her job or just enjoyed the glory of winning. Julian is repulsive, but he at least is unlikable from the start. When Tessa gives a self-righteous speech in court about feeling betrayed by the justice system she devoted her life to, I could only wonder why she forgot the reasons she devoted her life to giving exactly the same defense to her clients that Julian’s barrister gives to Julian. While she berates herself for doing “awful things to women” in her own cross-examinations (what we see of them is far from awful), the truth is that cross-examination is usually the most important protection that defendants have against false accusations. Cross-examination is not an “awful” feature of the criminal justice system even if the experience can be unpleasant or traumatic. It is the cost of assuring (not always successfully) that innocent defendants are not convicted.

In the end, by telling a one-sided agenda-driven story, Prima Facie is more a lecture than a convincing novel. Tessa is the only character who has a personality. The plot is entirely predictable because it is driven by the need to teach predictable lessons. Maybe people who are driven by the same agenda will appreciate Prima Facie but judging the novel solely by the standards of literature, Prima Facie does too little to earn a recommendation.

NOT RECOMMENDED