We have a cat who is disconsolate. He whines almost incessantly and can only be comforted when he has intimate body contact and the full attention of a human being. He also does normal cat things like sitting on your head, dribbling on your face and staring at you when you are sleeping. He is a very stupid cat but adorably elegant and attractive.
The central character of Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation must be a close cousin to our cat. She is desperate for love. Having identified a ‘beautiful’ man, Ciaran, as her beloved she moons around him, dewy eyed. She can only feel happy when she is in bed with him ‘where I wished we could be always, where he felt finally and truly mine’ because at all other times he might be thinking of his ex, Freja, or of any other woman. Sometimes the unnamed protagonist walks the streets on her own looking for women who she thinks he, Ciaran, might find attractive. He has not even seen them but they are his type. Then she can feel miserably jealous.
Nolan’s novel is about young womanhood and is predicated on self-loathing. At the time of the narrative the first person nameless one has dropped out of university in Dublin. Pre-dating that time she had developed into a beautiful creature but one who tortured her body with starvation and cutting. Now that she is less skeletal, a word that in her book means optimum physical perfection, she is ashamed of her flesh. A tiny fold of fat below her belly disgusts her. BC, that is Before Ciaran, she slept with an older man and noted his astonishment at her youthful body; he is breathless when he sees her fully naked and hardly dares approach her in his wonderment. Of course, after he’s had his way with her he drops her.
At one point she and Ciaran live together and she looks for ways of sublimating herself to him. Ciaran, unfortunately, has lost the senses of smell and taste, yet she impoverishes herself buying expensive food at a delicatessen, and cooking gourmet dishes which he cannot taste. He ignores the elegant presentation of her savouries and sweets because he just is not interested in food. Often she will decide not to eat to punish herself but Ciaran does not notice her deprivations. She cleans, scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, using undiluted bleach. She handwashes his threadbare clothing.
She weeps often. He is disgusted by her paroxysms and her blotchy, red, swollen face. She begs and pleads for attention even though he could never placate or satisfy her neediness. But she ‘has decided to live for him and let him take the great weight’ of herself. In this relationship Ciaran is not even required to love her totally or, indeed, to love her at all because she feels that there ‘was no me’. And yet, she craves his love.
Ciaran is, by all accounts, a spiteful person and the other characters cannot stand him. Friends rally around in an attempt to distract her with other activities but she shrugs them off. Her preference is to devote herself to obsessing about him and searching for photos of Freja online. In this way she can make herself feel desolate.
A domestic cat is not expected to have agency beyond using its cat litter tray and eating its food. But a woman? The story told in Acts of Desperation is deeply depressing. This character’s wilful refusal to have an identity is more extreme even than the self-abuse chronicled in recent novels like Sally Rooney’s Normal People or Louise O’Neill’s Almost Love. It is an indictment of society that these excellent writers need to record desperate acts rather than lauding strong, independent, balanced young women.
Works cited
Nolan, M. Acts of Desperation. Jonathan Cape. 2020.
O’Neill, L. Almost Love. riverrun. 2018.
Rooney, S. Normal People. Faber & Faber. 2018.
BBC R4 has broadcast a reading of the novel (abridged).
A version of this review was first published in the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 6th March 2021. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.
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