The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
What happens when love turns toxic?
Deeply felt and spikily intelligent, Megan Nolan’s debut novel proves she’s a talent to watch
ACTS OF DESPERATION by Megan Nolan
288pp, Jonathan Cape, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £9.99
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Millennials have been around long enough that even the grumpiest middle-aged commentator can’t pretend we’re all the same any more. This is true of millennial writers, too, and in recent months a few battle lines have emerged. In one corner, there are the Sally Rooneys, poised and earnest. In the other, there are the Lauren Oylers – cynical, caustic and ready to lob a Molotov cocktail at anything that looks too sincere. Reader, choose your side.
But then there’s Megan Nolan, the Irish journalist and essayist, who has made her name with writing that’s both deeply felt and seriously, spikily intelligent. In her work for the New Statesman and elsewhere, she tackles the big themes – love, sex, loneliness, friendship – from a personal angle, as plenty of people do. What’s distinctive is the precision with which she picks apart her emotions, even the contradictory or ignoble ones. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard, the craggy high priest of autofiction (and a declared influence), she turns the minutiae of her experience into something that resonates far more widely. Her novel, you could say, was waiting to be written – and here it is.
Acts of Desperation is narrated by a young woman – similar to Nolan in many respects – as she looks back on a dysfunctional relationship that scarred her early 20s. The story begins in 2012; she’s living in Dublin, rudderless and often drunk (“I was hung-over most mornings to some degree, and badly maybe twice a week”). Having tried various men “for size”, she is captivated by Ciaran: half-Irish, half-Danish, in possession of some killer cheekbones, and “the first man I worshipped”. The difficulty, which becomes apparent early on, is that Ciaran is an almighty jerk. His affectations (“ratty fingerless gloves”) are just the start of it: he’s touchy and patronising, cruelly aloof one moment and controlling the next. But as he pushes her away, she stakes everything on keeping hold of him. Why?
As a portrait of love grown toxic, Acts of Desperation is gripping enough. The narrator and Ciaran eventually move in together, and their flat becomes a Petri dish of warped power play. She cooks, cleans and puts up with his moods. “If he got something out of me,” she reasons, “I was taking something from him, too. I was taking away his ability to live without me easily.” But it’s her unflinching self-interrogation that gives this novel its moral weight and complexity. What’s behind her belief “that a man’s adoration or need to f--- me would make all the bad parts of myself be quiet forever”? Even if she figures it out, will it stop her from making bad decisions? She challenges us, too. Isn’t she complicit? Do we simply see her as a victim? There are no easy answers. Readers hoping for Rooney-esque consolations – a magazine commission or a massive scholarship to ease the pain – will be disappointed.
Nolan’s style is elegant and unaffected. Her narrator can be sharpeyed (about, say, “men who weren’t particularly attractive but believed, more or less correctly, that they could have and do whatever they wanted”) and wide-eyed (another man makes “the world itself seem good and ripe and ready to run towards”). Acts of Desperation feels entirely contemporary. There’s social media and cyber-stalking; there are desultory hours spent reading “the Wikipedias of lesserknown serial killers”. What’s refreshing is that the digital noise doesn’t drown out everything else. As many young novelists tie themselves in knots over what to do about the internet, Nolan’s approach feels like a way forward.
There are weaker points. A couple of pages read as though they’ve been yanked out of a column; and, just occasionally, Nolan’s emotional articulacy deserts her (addressing men who “wheedle” for sex, she says: “You have stolen...what does not belong to you”). But she’s the millennial author everyone should be watching right now.