First, let me say that I am surprised that Green Dot is not on the Women’s Prize longlist. Then again, it was published last month, so perhaps it is not eligible this year. I admired this smart, sharply-etched debut novel by Madeleine Gray, an Australian writer and critic who painfully portrays the culture of the workplace.
The desperately witty narrator, Hera, reminds me of an old friend who was incredibly witty and funny, but very sad beneath the surface. She disappeared after she moved away, and the high school reunion people tried in vain to find her. I finally googled her and read that she had died of complications from diabetes in her forties.
I remember her humor so vividly. At a local rock concert at a lakeside park, she put a carrot in the shoe of a friend who had remarked, “I’m really into carrots.” (So she could be “into” carrots). And the music was so bad that she feigned ecstasy by twirling her head around so her long hair whipped around like a tornado. “This is so groo-ooo-vy!” Since we never heard anyone say “groovy” except in movies, and believed the word was invented by the media, this was more sarcasm.
Madeleine Grey’s heroine is older than my friend and I at the heights of silliness, but her novel is full of wit and sarcasm. The narrator, Hera, a Millennial (or gen Z?) woman with three art degrees, is as witty as a stand-up comic, but has no career options. In high school she vaguely wanted to be a painter: that is not a viable ambition. She lives with her dad and their dog, Jude, and would like to earn a fourth degree at the university, but is resigned to becoming a working adult.
One hears that today’s workplace is even more appalling than it used to be for college graduates. Certainly our academic department provided us with a list of moderately interesting, appropriate jobs for graduates in our field. But Hera has no such luck: she must scroll a jobs website, Seek. And clearly the internet has created many pointless, horrifying jobs which neither Hera nor I have heard of.
The best of the jobs seems to be an “online community moderator” position for a newspaper. This entails reading every comment on every article in the paper, highlighting comments that are edgy or too contentious and sending a warning of suspension to those who go over the top. (No one ever gets suspended, though.) Hera gets the job, and the hours drag at work.
Gray’s descriptions of Hera’s boredom at her job are evocative of the very real pain of meaningless repetitive work. At one point she cites Virginia Woolf’s scene in To the Lighthouse where “time passes.” Hera comments,
… Woolf clearly never worked as a comment moderator…. Because I feel every second of time passing. I feel every five-minute interval. There is not one moment where I conveniently zone out and then I am in the future. My present is the screen in front of me, and my present is aching for my lunch break every day, aching for sweet release.
I am most impressed by Gray’s descriptions of the workplace, but she devotes equal time to Hera’s workplace romance. And with all that boredom floating around the office, such affairs are inevitable. Twenty-four-year-old Hera flirts in the elevator with her fortysomething boss, Arthur, before she realizes he is the boss. They instant-message all day, go out for Chinese food, and suddenly they are visiting cheap hotels for sexual interludes.
Hera spends much of her time waiting for the ping and three green dots that signal his texts and instant messages. It is love by ping. It is a sad love affair. He does not mention he is married until he gets a late-night phone call from his wife. Her sensible friends try to dissuade her from dating him by reminding her that he will never leave his wife. Hera has hope, though.
The role of the internet and instant messaging in the romance is particularly depressing. Hera is brilliant and imaginative, but she is not a happy woman, and the excitement might have been less pervasive if everything, including renting hotel rooms and Airbnb’s, were not accompanied by pings on the phone or internet. The role of the phone in the romance is iniquitous. Even at parties, she looks down at her phone and waits for notifications of his texts. Parts of this book are very painful to read, but Hera tries to find happiness despite the pain.
Dorothy Parker knew what it was like to wait by the phone for a man, and Gray sketches a similar picture of the modern woman. Green Dot is a smart, witty novel, but it is not quite a comedy, and it is certainly not a romance.
Indeed, I think Gray has created her own genre here.
