There’s a kinetic energy in the beginning of a romantic relationship. The good ones, when they’re starting, are saturated with playful pats on the arm, full-throated laughter, buzzing phones. But maybe “the good ones” isn’t an accurate descriptor. Maybe, it’s not about good or bad, but about the mark you already sense they’re going to leave, even amid that first drunken flirtation, teetering at the apartment door, full of anticipation.
Dolly Alderton’s Good Material seduces you with these moments.
“No matter how late it got or how much we drank, she stayed so certain and playful and articulate. I had to work hard to keep up with her and match her confidence. I cringed as I watched drunken thoughts tumble out of my mouth like Scrabble tiles and I tried to piece them together in clever observations,” the protagonist, Andy, thinks on the night he meets his girlfriend, Jen — the one who (no spoilers) would break his heart and launch the soul-searching, grief-managing quest that makes up much of the book’s plot.
A few beats later, the pair are at her door. She’s teasing him for not kissing her. He teases back that he’s working up to it. She makes the first move. For those of us who swoon at on-the-page chemistry, Alderton’s got it locked and loaded. And it’s got a peculiar effect, especially for a novel written mostly from the perspective of a broken-hearted straight man: while the novelty t-shirts scream dump him and our friends tell us to delete his number, the romantic in us asks: but what if, maybe, we shouldn’t? What if it could be that good again?
We know it won’t, of course, because there’s an entire book ahead of us, but it does set the stakes. People break up and get back together, sometimes, and it’s okay, sometimes, right?
In come the Eternal Sunshine-esque glimpses into the beautiful mundanity of long-term relationships, juxtaposed by real-time handwringing over what went wrong. The reader finds themself unsure who to root for. The longing intensifies — but for what?
It’s Fates and Furies meets The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and I personally cast the lead with Owen Wilson. Like both of these stories, (as well as Wilson, arguably, in Midnight in Paris), the nostalgia can, at times, feel like it’s slowing the story down. What does it matter, after it all, if how things are isn’t reflective of how things were? Should we be saving the present for the past? The narrative addresses this head-on with a tongue-in-cheek imaginary token system that limits how much one is allowed to deconstruct their past relationships with their friends. The reader may begin to feel, at times, that they are one of those friends and that the narrator has exceeded their budget. But just then, of course, hijinks ensue. And then, like good friends, we forgive. We make room for future indulgences. After all, it could be us.
“What is that thing they say?” Andy asks the reader. “Poetry is the most reviled and redundant art form, everyone rolls their eyes at it and takes the piss out of it. But the second that something shit happens in our lives, it’s the first recourse we have.”
xo
Monica
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