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.

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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

The Dickens Boy by Thomas Keneally

Published in Australia in 2020; published by Atria Books on March 8, 2022

The Dickens Boy is Edward “Plorn” Dickens, Charles Dickens’ youngest son. Having shown no talent for anything beyond cricket, and having failed to confess to his famous father that he never managed to read any of the great man’s novels, Plorn feels both guilt and relief when his father sends him to Australia, a country in which Plorn's brother Alfred already resides. Plorn hopes he can apply himself in a new land and become the kind of man his father might admire.

Plorn quickly discovers that Australians venerate his father just as much as the British. Some have memorized long passages from their favorite Dickens novels. Still, Plorn rejects the employment that was arranged for him on the ground that the employer asks too many dishonorable questions about his father’s dalliance with Plorn’s aunt. The employer to which Plorn next applies, Momba Station in New South Wales, becomes the “place that concentrated the forces of his soul.”

Plorn has experiences he could not have imagined in his father’s sheltering embrace. He is shocked when a man tries to kiss him, but his refusal is polite. He gets high on a substance provided by an Aboriginal friend. His first pleasurable reading experience comes when Dandy Darnell gives him a manuscript in the hope that Plorn’s father will publish it. When Dandy writes of his attraction to his aunt (who has been mistreated by her husband), his writing may be autobiographical. Plorn is coming into his own understanding of sexual desire (15-year-old Constance Desailley is often on his mind) and it is probably for that reason that Dandy’s innuendo-free writing speaks to him. Plorn cannot muster interest in the socially acceptable poetic and indirect descriptions of sexual attraction that are favored by his father’s generation. He is quite taken, however, by Dandy’s references to Blake’s argument that men and women both require “the lineaments of Gratified Desire.”

It is a matter of history and thus not a spoiler that Charles Dickens died while Plorn was still a teenage resident of Australia. The novel takes place before and in the immediate aftermath of that death. In his acknowledgements, Thomas Keneally notes that history does not reveal how Plorn learned of his father’s death. Unfettered by history, Keneally invents a brilliant scene that involves the notorious bushranger Frank Pearson, a/k/a Captain Starlight. Perhaps for good reason, Keneally imagines Plorn undergoing the standard denial stage of death. “The resurrection of Christ was easier to believe in than the death of Charles Dickens.”

Historians seem to regard Plorn, like nearly all of the Dickens children, as a failure. The novel’s sympathetic portrayal imagines Plorn as a person who, living in his father’s constant shadow but lacking his father’s gifts, does his best to live up to his father’s expectations. Keneally imagines that Plorn’s love for and devotion to his father was fierce. Regardless of his successes and failures, Plorn’s steadfast defense of his father makes him an admirable character. The novel ends while Plorn is still young, well before he enters politics and succumbs to debt. Yet it ends on a sad note, perhaps to foreshadow the life that was to follow.

The atmosphere of cricket matches and wool shearing, emus and kangaroos, is vivid. One of the novel’s themes is prejudice against the native “darks,” a prejudice not shared at Momba Station and that Plorn instantly rejects. An open-minded priest who befriends and lives among the Aboriginals plays a modest role in the story. He is indirectly responsible for the coming-of-age moment that causes Plorn to realize that he “had been fatuous trying to grow up into manhood in a measured way.”

One of the delights of reading The Dickens Boy is the discussion of Charles Dickens’ novels and stories, including some passages that characters recite from memory. Dickens’ melodramatic plots are disfavored in the post-modern world, but I still regard him as one of the best storytellers in the history of literature — and certainly one of the best creators of memorable characters. Trollope dismissed Dickens as “Mr. Popular Sentiment,” an insult that (in the novel) Alfred holds against Trollope’s son, who has been relegated to Australia like the Dickens boys.

Alfred parses his father’s work for clues about his father’s views of Australia, a topic that likely of particular interest to Keneally and to Australian readers of Dickens' work. Is Australia a land of convicts or a land where criminals have the opportunity to remake themselves? In his books, Alfred observes, Dickens sends criminals and prostitutes and stupid people to Australia. Does that mean Dickens thought Alfred and Plorn were stupid? The boys have differing opinions, but they aren’t certain of the truth. They also disagree, to an extent, about their father’s moral character. Plorn reads one of his his father’s essays to reaffirm his belief that Charles Dickens was generous in his love for the lowliest members of society (although Plorn hasn’t yet encountered Uriah Heep). One of the novel’s burning questions is whether Plorn will ever read David Copperfield, a question that had me thinking, “Just read it and ask yourself whether you recognize something of your father’s life in its pages.”

Keneally avoids Dickensian melodrama but writes with sentiment about Dickens and his influence upon Australians. Keneally is a skilled storyteller in his own right. The story loses some of its voltage after Plorn’s father dies — eulogies and memories slow the story’s pace as it limps to a conclusion — but the novel as a whole is engrossing.

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The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott

Published in Australia in 2020; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG Originals) on February 9, 2021

A central character in The Rain Heron believes she brought a myth to life and comes to regret her actions. Robbie Arnott creates a myth and brings a novel to life as he tells the story of two women whose lives the myth changes.

The Rain Heron opens with a fable about a heron that brings prosperity to an unlucky farmer until a jealous neighbor kills it and brings misfortune to everyone. The heron is nearly transparent, a bird made of water. Later in the story, we learn that the rain heron (or perhaps a different one) actually exists and that it is capable of changing the climate in its immediate vicinity by breathing steam or frost.

The main story takes place in an unnamed country in troubled times. The country has experienced a coup. The weather is extreme and unpredictable. Jobs have disappeared. Schools are closed and crime is rampant.

When the main story starts, we know only that a woman named Ren is living on her own on a mountain, using a cave for shelter, trapping animals and foraging for mushrooms. She meets weekly with a man named Barlow, who trades goods from the village for her animal skins. Barlow warns her that soldiers have come to the village but we don’t know why. Ren shows no interest in news of the soldiers until she meets one, a female lieutenant named Zoe Harker who wants her help searching for the mythical heron. Her methods to gain Ren’s assistance are cruel but effective. Harker pays a price for disturbing the heron, just as Ren pays a price for resisting Harker.

The novel’s second part tells Harker’s backstory, although most of that story concerns Harker’s mother, who uses her blood to coax squid into releasing their ink, and the foreigner who tries to learn her secret. The squid, like the rain heron, have mythological qualities that become apparent during the ink-releasing ritual.

The third part returns to the present, focusing largely on a medic named Daniel as Harker’s soldiers turn to the next phase of their mission. When Daniel asks Harker why the generals want the rain heron, she responds, “Men want things. They hear about something and pretty soon they’re convinced it belongs to them.” Harker's jaded view of men may change before the novel ends.

Harker’s story, in fact, is one of a constantly changing life, a life of apparent self-discovery followed by her discovery that she cannot abide the person she has become. Daniel’s story is a struggle to retain the sense of hope and empathy that has sustained his young life in the face of the horrors he has seen.

In the novel’s concluding part, a worker at a wildlife sanctuary tells Harker that he believed in rain herons as a child, because children believe everything that they are told, but later stopped believing in impossible things. After the coup, when things stopped making sense, he found it possible to believe in the impossible again. The worker, Alec, was a terrible soldier who was finally assigned to the sanctuary as a research assistant. Now he’s alone and forgotten, a condition that suits him. It seems a good place for Harker to join him in a brooding reflection on the lessons we might learn from myths. At least until the past catches up with the present, leading to a final dramatic moment that will change Harker’s life again.

Arnott balances a harsh story with soothing prose that carries the plot in the grip of its steady currents. His characters are decent people who live in indecent times, people who might behave indecently without losing their humanity. The novel’s ending combines the myth of the rain heron with the myth of the squid to make something new and wondrous.

If myths teach lessons, one lesson taught by The Rain Heron is that reality does its best to crush mythology, yet we can learn from both. We can learn from our mistakes. We can crawl up from the depths of our despair. And if we can’t change the past, we can at least make amends.

Myths are meant to tell us something about where we came from and who we are. They help us see ourselves with sharper clarity. By blending the motifs of mythology with the dangers that confront inhabitants of the modern world (unstable government, global warming), The Rain Heron reminds us that we can be better than we have been, that we possess the power to transform ourselves and our world, to make the impossible possible.

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Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

Published by Scribner on February 18, 2020

Dhananjaya Rajaratnam has reinvented himself as Danny, a self-employed house cleaner in Sydney. For four years, he has been “a brown man in a white man’s city.” Danny is Tamil but he has added golden highlights to his hair. The weirdness of his appearance appeals to Australians, or so he believes. Danny was a minority in Sri Lanka but he prefers Australia, where being “not like everyone else” earns respect.

Danny came to Sydney on a student visa, dropped out, and stayed in the country illegally. He finds it easy to become “invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway.” Danny works as a shelf stocker for an angry Greek shopkeeper. In exchange, he sleeps in a storeroom and gives the Greek half his earnings from cleaning jobs. Danny faces competition from Chinese and Nepali cleaners who offer more people on a team for the same hourly rate, but he scores clients by furnishing his own equipment; “a cleaner impresses with his autonomy.”

Danny is dating Sonja, an Asian whose accepting liberalism makes him comfortable. He has not told Sonja the real reason he can’t return to school or get a driver’s license. Nor does she know that he can’t get healthcare.

Those problems are common to undocumented migrants across the world, but Amnesty highlights a particular problem that has an impact not just on migrants, but on the societies in which they live. Many of the apartments Danny cleans are in the same vicinity. While cleaning one of them, he becomes aware that a crime was committed in another. A former cleaning client named Radha Thomas was murdered. He happens to know (and might be the only person who knows) that another client, a man named Prakash Wadhwa, was having an affair with Radha and had behaved violently toward her. Should he tell the police and risk deportation, or should he protect his own interest by allowing a possible killer to escape justice?

A just society, or even a society motivated by self-interest rather than prejudice, would reward a migrant who reports a crime by granting some form of amnesty. Deporting people who act in a country’s interest discourages undocumented migrants from doing the right thing. Even citizens who hate immigrants, citizens who are motivated by self-interest in the perceived struggle of “us” versus “them,” should be able to understand the logic of rewarding migrants who act in society’s interest rather than their own.

While Danny marvels at the justice system in Australia — a system considerably more just than Sri Lanka’s, were Danny was tortured for being Tamil — he knows that he will not be rewarded for contacting the police. He also knows that if he doesn’t, Prakash might flee the country, perhaps after killing Danny if Danny gives him that chance. Whether Danny will do the right thing under difficult circumstances — contact the police and risk deportation, tell the truth to Sonja and risk the end of their relationship — is the moral question that drives the plot.

The plot, however, is simply a vehicle to explore broader issues of social division. Aravind Adiga accomplishes that purpose with an observant view of Australian society. Danny perceives Sydney as divided between the thick bum suburbs, “where the working classes lived, ate badly, and cleaned for themselves,” and the thin bum suburbs, “where the fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their own homes.” The thick bums resent immigrants and the thin bums exploit them, exchanging cash for labor without asking questions that might compromise the arrangement.

In Danny’s unflattering opinion, “Australians aren’t particularly bright. They don’t work hard. They drink too much.  So you tell me. Why are they so rich?” The answer, of course, is that average Aussies are rich only in comparison to average citizens of less fortunate nations. Wealthy nations prosper, in part, by taking advantage of developing nations. The unequal distribution of wealth and how that bears on the issue of undocumented migration is one of Adiga’s underlying themes.

But even the brown men in the city are divided by status. The “Western Suburbs Indians, smug in their jobs and Toyota Camrys,” the Australian-born children who look at Danny with “I’ve got nothing in common with you, mate glances,” the Malaysian tourists shopping for cholesterol medication. Since they are Danny’s color, they all see him, and they all look down on him. Hence the golden highlights in Danny’s hair, the insolent indifference with which he returns their stares, the futile attempt to make them think his status might be similar to theirs.

Adiga addresses these urgent themes with his usual ability to find humor in serious issues, although his use of humor — including the social division between thick and thin bums — is less overt than in White Tiger and Selection Day. Adiga portrays Danny not as a stereotype or even an archetype of an illegal immigrant, but as a unique individual who, unlike the illegals he knows, does not experience shame as “an atmospheric force, pressing down from the outside,” but as a force that “bubbled up from within.” His shame is connected to his past in Sri Lanka. He would feel it even if Australia made him a citizen. For that reason, Adiga is an uncommonly sympathetic character, one who deals not only with the external pressure of prejudice and the fear of deportation, but internalized anxiety about his self-worth. In the end, Danny must ask himself what kind of person he truly is.

Amnesty is not a thriller, despite some marketing that suggests it can be read as one. The plot is thin by thriller standards, the action is tepid, and the resolution is unsurprising. As a serious exploration of issues confronting immigrants who lose (or never acquire) their legal status, Amnesty delivers provocative questions rather than chase scenes.  Both in its dissection of pressing social problems and in its portrayal of a complex protagonist, Amnesty is another compelling work from Aravind Adiga.

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