‘People enjoyed me, because while I was attractive enough I was not intimidating. I was buoyant and good-natured and occasionally a little bit mean in an amusing way. I looked and fucked like a woman but could drink and take drugs and talk like a lad.’
Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation
‘You wouldn’t know it from looking at me, but I’ve got a real thing about the nineteenth-century novel. I know my freedoms dwarf those of its heroines, but that doesn’t stop me identifying with women anxious to see if their saviour will arrive.’
Luke Brown, Theft
In an essay for the Times Literary Supplement titled ‘Emasculated: The problem of men writing about sex’, Luke Brown dipped a toe into the piranha tank of literary gender politics. ‘Many of us male writers have ceased to describe ourselves honestly, and no longer seem able to present a world in which reconciliation with women is fraught’, wrote Brown, perhaps seeking some cover in the first-person plural. The slightly sheepish tone couldn’t quite conceal a pessimistic message about the difficulty of rendering male desire in fiction: ‘men who want to be on the right side of history may feel it is no longer politic to write about it.’
The essay was published in July last year, five months after the release of Brown’s second novel, Theft, and it can be read both as an apologia and clarification of the novel. While reviews of Theft were generally warm, Brown might still have bristled at, say, Jonathan McAloon’s shiftiness: ‘Readers who never had much truck with the style – its charming man-child anti-heroes with their moral acrobatics and their guilt – or who believe the mode has rightly had its day, may find male desire as boring as usual.’ McAloon omits one of the most notable things about Theft: the strikingly low-key sexuality of its narrator, Paul, a 33-year-old sort-of journalist who lives in the cheapest flat in London and finds himself surrounded by secure and successful women. Paul has plenty of sex, but none of it is described, and he is distinctly uncarnal in his thoughts and motivations. ‘He is candid and transparent when ruminating on family and friends, but of his sexual machinations we get zilch’, wrote Houman Barekat in his review. For Barekat this is to the novel’s credit, but Brown’s TLS essay indicates that it might not have been a purely aesthetic decision: ‘Heterosexual male desire has been linked so closely to abuses of power for so long that the two seem inextricable.’ So why risk it?
‘What do lads really want?’ asked Frances Wilson in her TLS review of Theft. For Wilson, chicklit explores the dream of ‘having it all’ while ‘ladlit gives us the darker fantasy of having nothing at all. Bridget Jones wanted Mark Darcy’s wedding-cake house in Holland Park, but the ladlit antihero is happy with a mattress on the floor, a bike in the hall and a girlfriend to do his washing.’ Faced with a novel that has a superficial similarity to ladlit (whatever that is), Wilson falls back on reflexive stereotyping. But Theft is more complicated than that, and the usual male/female dichotomies no longer apply.
What do lads really want? It’s not a question I’m that interested in answering – it just seemed like a good title – but I’ll have a go: they want to escape games of money and status while avoiding the taint of emasculation and the erotic vacuum of the ‘kept man’. This seems to be true of Paul, at least. Besotted with the Victorian novel, awaiting his ‘saviour’, he is not exactly laddish, and he would probably be quite happy with the wedding-cake house. When it comes to his desires – when it comes to love – he is finicky and nervous, barely able to give voice to his wants. ‘There are lots of us out there, looking for each other, who think a new person is the most exciting thing’ – and then, as if he can hear the reader clearing her throat to object – ‘Not thing: don’t purposely misconstrue me. Sentient being. Equal. Superior.’ He is keenly aware of the ‘overdetermined love of man for woman that makes life so full of jeopardy for women.’ When Amy, his sister, ‘a serial dater in the American style’, declares young men in London to be ‘the worst men in the world’, Paul isn’t prepared to argue the point: ‘I know when I am beaten.’
Paul sometimes goes against the grain, but with the softest possible touch. After overhearing a woman’s anti-patriarchy spiel, he dares to ask about the men who don’t have ‘a sense of entitlement’. She replies that sexism is present ‘from the top to the bottom’ – entitlement is not related to material circumstances. ‘And then I made the mistake of continuing’, says Paul (though the argument never really takes off). Later he reports that he ‘made the mistake [again] of wondering out loud to Sophie [a feminist journalist] whether one of the great damages men might have done to women was to make it natural for them to believe anything bad that is said about men.’ Again this slight rebellion is curtailed and the argument goes nowhere.
Wilson is harsh on Paul: ‘He sees himself as an affable David Baddiel-type; but he is in fact a stalker, a liar and a creep who somehow manages to charm every woman in the book.’ She downplays his obvious self-doubt and overstates his sleazier qualities. It is always clear that he is in the weaker position when it comes to women (and in the end he doesn’t get the girl). He isn’t much of a creep, either – though the concept creep of ‘creep’ has left the word loose enough to describe any male behaviour between dodgy and deviant.
Maybe Wilson took a dim view of the following exchange: Paul drunkenly leans in to kiss a much older woman who has encouraged him to apply for a job in publishing. The kiss doesn’t land: ‘She put a hand between us and laughed. “Oh, Paul. That has cheered me up. How funny! Make sure you send in that application.”’ This passing moment somehow stuck with me more than anything else in the novel, probably because it’s natural, it’s real, it’s the kind of thing that actually happens. I have become so used to the hard-nosed power plays between men and women in books and the media, so jaded by the whole thing, that the plain description of a clumsy pass followed by an easy refusal – a fairly common interaction in life, I suspect – has the shock of the new.
In his essay, Brown claims that he and his cohort of male writers favour new fiction by women; they read it, talk about it, admire it. He thinks that ‘women’s freedom to own their desire in all its destructiveness and to write about it with relish’ gives them the edge. He also notes an advantage among gay writers: ‘[Garth] Greenwell provides an illuminating comparison with [Ben] Lerner and [Sally] Rooney in the way he writes about desire as a gay man – there is much less anxiety in this space without women.’ That last phrase deserves its own essay, but the general observation is not a new one. In a 1998 review of Howard Jacobson’s No More Mr Nice Guy, Germaine Greer pays dubious tribute to David Plante and Alan Hollinghurst for establishing the ‘phallocentric mode’: ‘Gay literature has described gay male transactions, whether lavatorial or paradisiacal, in grinding, stubbly, jissom-slithery detail’. But while the vocabulary of disgust is rich and plentiful when it comes to describing the proclivities of men, we are not permitted to be appalled by female desire – women are fearless, not toxic; filthy, at a stretch, but not creepy.
Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation might lack the high-definition sex of The Swimming-Pool Library, but its combination of lustful obsession and unblinking emotional fervour is just as pungent. It occupies the negative space around Theft: Nolan is bold where Brown is shy; she is unembarrassable and absolutely sure of a sympathetic audience, where he is self-conscious and in constant fear of interruption. Her unnamed narrator is dissolute, destructive, unreliable and frantically promiscuous. She invokes the last years of William Faulkner as a point of comparison – the square-jawed alcoholic stoically seeking oblivion, defiant in the face of all concern – but she’s kidding herself. Desperation is as soft-boiled as it gets, the weepiest, soggiest novel I have ever read.
The unwavering melodrama can be measured by its weight in tears. On page 63 the narrator cries on a bus when she spots the ‘approaching lights’ of her home city (the suitably named Waterford) which she says happens ‘every time’ she sees them. On page 80 she cries in church with her dad during Christmas service, and when she gets home, on page 81, she curls up next to her mum and cries again. When her boyfriend, Ciaran, attempts to end the relationship on page 86, leaving her ‘doubled over in the doorway’, she cries. On the very next page, recounting the suicide of an old friend, she is once again in tears (fair enough). ‘I smiled and smiled until I cried’, writes Nolan on page 94, and then on page 95: ‘All photographs of [Ciaran] made me cry’. On page 99 she sobs over the phone to her long-suffering friend Lisa. Nolan could have saved herself a lot of typing with an Amisian disclaimer borrowed from Brown’s first novel, My Biggest Lie: unless I tell you otherwise, assume I am always crying.
There are no gentle gradations here, nor is there restraint, propriety, composure. Occasionally the narrator will check herself ‘and even laugh at such trite performances of heartbreak.’ But these are fleeting moments of lucidity in a suffocating dream. Words like ‘sad’ and ‘depressed’ recur so frequently that they no longer register beyond the first few chapters. ‘Beautiful’ is used liberally, as often as three times a page, so that the reader quickly learns not to trust it. Nolan’s narrator sometimes describes herself as beautiful, but also detests the way she looks. She expresses bemusement at the idea of anyone loving or hating their own body, but then declares a couple of pages later that she both loves and hates her body, without tidying up the apparent contradiction. Generous readers might call this feminist ambivalence, but it’s more like the ambivalence of a teenage tantrum – aimlessly hormonal and impervious to reason. And despite the gaudier accessories of adulthood – the drinking and smoking, the drug-taking and sex – Nolan’s narrator is still very much a teenager, living the teenager’s idea of an adult life (something Brown’s narrator chides himself for), unstable and reckless, vain and self-pitying, intolerable company.
The relentless emotional monotone does yield rewards, if you have a taste for gothic detail. While peeling some potatoes the narrator is taken by a spasm of jealousy – Ciaran is talking to an ex-girlfriend – and stabs her thumb: ‘I bled into the wet colander of peeled potatoes, until Ciaran emerged from our bedroom and I showed him that I had ruined dinner.’ Ciaran barely reacts and suggests ordering a takeaway. ‘And I turned back to my mess, furious, boiling, wanting so badly for him to be angry with me.’ She remembers an incident from her days as a teenage cutter, when a perfume salesman heedlessly sprayed her bare arm ‘too late to stop by the time he registered the open wounds he was spraying into.’ Arms ‘burning alarmingly’ she is ‘sullied by the judgement’ of the salesman – but why slice up your arms if not to inspire pity and revulsion?
It’s the kind of question you’re not supposed to ask. All part of the enigma of female suffering which men could never possibly even hope to etc. But self-harmers nearly always have more than one victim in mind, and it’s interesting that the narrator’s actions in this regard – actions which might possibly be considered grossly manipulative and even abusive in the context of a relationship – have been overlooked or excused by reviewers. Ciaran’s terse coldness and the trappings of unequal sexual relations are seen as the main boosters of the narrator’s self-harm, and critics – all women, as far as I can tell – have emphasised how the novel resonates with their own experiences. The normally cool-headed Claire Lowdon has all the awe of someone who has been sincerely moved – or, more faddishly, seen – when she writes that she ‘knew a Ciaran once’ and was therefore ‘transfixed with admiration and visceral horror’ as the novel unfolded. ‘Nolan’s portrait of a relationship warped by obsession and low self-worth excavates our private hearts’, wrote Madeleine Feeny in the Evening Standard. In The New Republic, Philippa Snow concluded her review with a strange admission (after quoting Nolan): ‘“What would I think about, now that I wasn’t thinking about love or sex?” she asks herself. It is—after a novel’s worth of bad decisions—a good question, one more comforting than those the reader has been asking herself for the previous 250 pages: Do I act like that? Do I sound like that? Do I beg like that?’ The assumption that the reader will be a woman is justifiable – maybe – but the confidence in the novel’s relatability among female readers, however wary, is surprising. A similar novel by a man – whatever that might look like – would call for a cagey or flippant response as a counterweight. Reviewers would take a step back, smirking uneasily or covering their eyes. Even positive notices would have to establish some distance between reviewer and subject. Men might identify with Alexander Portnoy or Patrick Bateman or, in extreme cases, Jonathan Franzen – but to bluntly state such a fact under their own name? To assume gender-wide appeal?
The intimacy (and nosiness) that some female writers inspire among their readers could be either burdensome or gratifying, I imagine, depending on mood and temperament. In a feature for the Observer titled ‘How women conquered the world of fiction’, Johanna Thomas-Corr spoke to Sam Byers about discrepancies in the way male and female writers are treated: ‘In interviews and talks, [Byers] is constantly invited to grandstand on politics or the craft of fiction in a way that his female contemporaries aren’t. Too often, he says, women are expected to write about and discuss their personal lives.’ This might be true, but, contrary to Byers’ apparent interpretation, couldn’t these differing expectations suggest that women’s fiction is held in higher esteem? After a profound experience with a novel, readers are unlikely to ask about politics or craft. These are ancillary questions. They want to know the author.
Nolan has said that Desperation began as a book of non-fiction, and even in its current state it narrowly qualifies as a novel. Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of her literary models, and his praise garnishes the hardback, but more relevant to Nolan’s style is her regular gig as a columnist. Her chapters are usually within column-length and she sometimes breaks off into the breezy patter of the 21st century opinion writer: ‘People talk more and more about female desire nowadays, which we all agree is good, a step forward.’ Sometimes the overspill from one form to the other flows in the opposite direction. In a 2021 Guardian interview Nolan claimed that, unlike Lowdon, ‘there has been no Ciaran in her own life’. But the first several paragraphs of a 2017 piece, ostensibly about the Wetherspoon’s pub chain, give us something like a digest of Desperation. Nolan describes a doomed love affair with a man who is nearly identical to the later depiction of Ciaran. Like Ciaran, this man is tall, with the ‘slightly bad posture of someone who became so very early and tried to hide it.’ Both Ciaran and the unnamed man are described as ‘beautiful’, of course. The following description from the article is repeated almost word for word in the novel: ‘The way his cheekbones were so high that they made his eyes wolfish and cruel; the way his long fingers grasped purposefully at the air as he spoke as though arranging decorations.’ Like Ciaran, the unnamed man is broke and restless and not entirely committed. Missing in the non-fiction account, where the relationship seems simply to fizzle out, is the violence that erupts towards the end of the novel, a twisted moment of catharsis that collapses any ambiguity and brings to mind the literal-minded climax of Kristen Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person’, in which unwarranted suspicion is retrospectively vindicated (see? I was right about the bastard all along).
Despite her success, Nolan maintains a beleaguered air in her columns. Her favourite subjects are gender relations, dating, standard issue left-wing politics, and the horror of becoming an adult (she’s 30). We can be thankful that her novel is mostly free of the banalities that furnish some of her more listless writing for the New Statesman. At its best – and at its worst – Acts of Desperation is free of practically everything: good taste, cynicism, wisdom, structure, scruples, feminism, art. If Brown is an example of what Rob Doyle has called the ‘limping male novelist’ – though it’s hard to tell whether he’s genuinely hobbled or merely holding back for a more propitious time – Nolan is the juiced-up long distance runner pounding the track, exhausting the spectators. ‘They said that meekness and submission would only drive men away, that confidence was attractive’, says Nolan’s narrator, in one of her many sinister turns. ‘But I had done it, had worn him down with weakness.’