By Lisa Mclellan
Tell me if you can relate.
You’ve found yourself in a situation that is, from an objective point of view, not great. But you’ve invested so much time and energy into it, you feel compelled to pretend that it is okay and that everything is just fine.
Such is the case with Hera, the protagonist of Madeleine Gray’s debut novel, Green Dot, who is open about her own complicated situation right from the first line. She is in love with a man who will not leave his wife.
An academically successful teenager, Hera finds life after high school somewhat lacking in promise. Neither a daily office grind, nor a high-flying career appeal to her and while this principle initially brings her a sense of superiority, she eventually concedes that it is time to get a job and start a ‘life’.
Her account of this process is witheringly funny. After weeks of mindlessly constructing buzz word-laden resumes and heeding the sage advice of employed friends (‘“Trust me, people in offices love lists”. Bitch is not wrong.’), Hera lands a monotonous content moderator’s job that takes exactly four days to fill her with despair. The only lighthouse amid the grey-suited darkness of corporate Sydney? An encounter with a middle-aged British journalist from her company named Arthur.
A flirtation develops between the two and culminates on a couch at Hera’s dad’s house. After they finally have sex, Arthur takes a phone call and hurriedly leaves, throwing Hera’s world into chaos. Despite the fact that his social media platforms showcase a green dot, he is not, in a broader sense, actually available.
But we knew he was married. Hera told us in the beginning. So, what is to be gained by reading a story for which the ending has already been spoiled? There is so much to like about this gripping page-turner. Gray’s command of narrative voice is captivating. I devoured this book. The combination of her cultural references, from Zelda Fitzgerald to Moira Rose, capture the character of such a specific type of young Millennial woman that I finished the book convinced that I had met Madeleine Gray at a party once.
Hera’s account of their relationship is also blisteringly honest. She is both vulnerable and frank about the mistakes she makes in the process of navigating the situation with Arthur and growing up as a whole, and this makes her a wonderfully complex character. She is the kind of flawed human being that young readers will both empathise with and see themselves in. In a series of asymmetrical chapters that read like a monthly catch-up with your high school friends, she lays bare her own deep-seated desires for family and stability. She is candid about both her thought processes when she is pushing him to come clean and about what a wonderful delusion it is to pretend that they are a normal couple for the few hours he can steal away from his wife. But despite her determination to be the ‘mythical mistress who actually gets the guy’, Hera knows that something is missing.
And unfortunately, that is also the feeling I was left with when I finished Green Dot.
There are brief moments in which Hera’s self-reflexive vivacity and agency add a welcome freshness to a plot line that often casts older men as predators and young women as prey. But Green Dot does not feel revolutionary in its treatment of the infidelity trope. A middle-aged man seeking a new lease on life through the romantic attentions of a younger mistress doesn’t break any moulds because it is told from the perspective of the mistress, even one as sharp and engaging as Hera. The narrative plays out how everyone expects it to. Arthur makes promise after promise, only to break each one at an escalating cost to our heroine’s emotional well-being.
And perhaps this is the point. Perhaps the age-old nature of this narrative is central to its ability to be relatable and recognisable, both in the realms of fiction and personal experience.
But one of the most compelling things about Hera as a narrator is her prodigious ability to reflect on and analyse the events of her own life. Several short chapters written in second person even invite the reader and their own judgements into the story (‘How long can this go on, you ask?’). And yet when she last bumps into Arthur on a beach-side walk, long after they have ended things, she angrily reiterates that it is over between them and then… it is over. The book ends.
For all her glorious sensibilities when it comes to the details in Arthur’s facial expressions, when the novel reaches its crescendo, she has no conclusions, no take aways, no searingly clever insights on the nature of relationships or being young. To extend the titular metaphor, the open-endedness of the finale left me on ‘read’ with no closure in sight.
I wanted very much to write a comprehensively adoring review of Green Dot. And perhaps the deflated feeling I was left with was more a reflection of one emotional chapter of a person’s life closing, than any small failing of the book itself. Hera is me and I am Hera, and every time I judged her actions, I knew I was judging a younger version of myself. Equally, every time I felt compassion for this young woman, I made a little more room for love and compassion for myself. What’s more, Hera’s quest to build a life that is authentically her own will feel unnervingly familiar to generations of young people that increasingly feel that a life has been plotted out for them before they have even had a chance to start making choices.
In the end, I had hoped the novel would say something innovative, and I don’t know that it did. What it did do, however, was unpack some of the challenges inherent in trying to write your own life outside of what you feel may be scripted for you. And in this sense, the ending may be less a lack of closure and more a case of endless future possibilities. A break from the confines of the Plathian bell jar and a return to the image of the fig tree, if you will.
Green Dot was first published by Allen & Unwin in 2023 and has an RRP of $32.99. It is available from most online and local retailers.
Lisa Mclellan is a writer and book lover from Melbourne’s inner West. She is currently balancing the completion of her Masters in Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing with working in publishing, playing baseball, learning the banjo, salsa dancing, and writing her own fantasy fiction. Does she NEED any more hobbies? No. Would she love more recommendations, though? Absolutely.
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