Book Club: Madeleine Gray’s Green Dot

At one point in Green Dot, the buzzy debut novel by Sydney-based author Madeleine Gray, 24-year-old protagonist Hera notes that the way she and her friends speak “is a foreign language” to her older boyfriend: “the slippage of levels between irony and sincerity and earnestness and melancholic capitalist apologism at play in the CoStar discourse that modulates our sentences and thoughts”.

It’s an apt summary of not only the meme-referencing mix of self-awareness and cynicism recognisable to anyone who has spent time with a certain sort of extremely online 20-something, but also the compulsively readable narrative voice that Gray creates for Hera. Indeed, it is this voice that’s key to the considerable appeal of Green Dot, which follows as Hera — armed with “three variations of an arts degree under my belt” but little in the way of concrete ambitions — applies for a job moderating reader comments for a news website.