Good Material, by Dolly Alderton

Yet Another Novel on the NYT’s “Top 10 Novels of 2024” List

Well, this is the first contemporary British novel I’ve read…probably ever, honestly. Like I said I’m going through the Top 10 NYT Best Novels of 2024 List. I read already Miranda July’s surprisingly good novel, All Fours. I’m currently reading—and so far really enjoying—Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (this novel, for me, turned out to be a bust: I stopped reading halfway through; it didn’t do anything for me) which was also on the list. And I’ve read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (2024 but not on the list) and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona (2022 and not on the list).

Anyway. The point is: Contemporary novels, right? Because I usually mostly (almost exclusively) read Old White Dead Men (O.W.D.M.). And, so far, I’ve been enjoying these novels.

Alderton’s novel, Good Material is perhaps a bit of an exception. It’s not a bad book, by any means, but it’s not what I’d (admittedly pretentiously) call “serious fiction” or certainly “literature.” (Intermezzo and All Fours are absolutely contemporary literature.)

Good Material is basically about a 30-year-old semi-failed standup comedian who’s been dumped by his girlfriend of four years and handles the breakup terribly and comes to realize how much emotional and psychological growing he still has to do.

*(Sidebar note: This is interesting to me, in contemporary writing: In Intermezzo, Lapvona and Good Material; all three novels are written by female authors writing in a male POV. I find this quite intriguing. Should more men write from women’s POV?)

Over the course of Good Material, Andy—the wayward, relatable everyman protagonist—faces himself in myriad uncomfortable ways: He’s childish and immature in many respects; selfish; he drinks too much; his life lacks foundation and direction; he doesn’t understand women as much as he’d like; he’s hopelessly confused by life’s ups and downs regarding feelings. Eventually he hits a sort of spiritual bottom internally and climbs his way back up into experience and awareness.

Andy comes to terms with the breakup, accepts that it’s over, finds his footing and direction, gets the closure he needs, and moves on. The novel is a story about personal growth, accepting life on life’s terms, walking the precarious tightrope of wants, needs and fears, and overcoming one’s own deep insecurities which ultimately cover up the deepest fear: Death.

I’ll give Alderton this much: The novel is “sticky.” Meaning: It’s a juicy page-turner. She knows how to make you keep reading pages. There’s a delicious mix of inner world colliding with outer reality. A lot of inner/outer “dissonance.” The clashing of our hopes, dreams, imaginations and expectations with the cold, hard wall of The Real World. The plot keeps us needing to find out what will happen next. Both Andy and his ex, Jen, feel generally believable as characters on the page, potential human beings in real life. And their realizations feel fairly true to form as they navigate their tricky, slippery, complex worlds.

And yet: At the same time, both characters also felt a little too two-dimensional to me, like wooden stock-characters. Alderton did a decent job at various points writing from a male point of view…but she ultimately lost me by making Andy, in my opinion, both too feminine and too male all at once.

What I mean is this. In some ways Andy’s thoughts are too clean, too bubbly, too pure, too crystalline. Men don’t think that way. Their thoughts—especially around women—are often pretty crude. Get half a dozen men together away from any women and let them discuss women and sex; it gets grotesque pretty fast. Just the nature of the beast. (I actually had a similar problem with the male POV in Intermezzo, though not as bad. At once too feminine and yet also too cliché male.)

What’s lost, for me, with Andy, is the middle-ground where most men and women life: Nuance, complexity, layers.

For example. Andy struggles terribly with emotions. He doesn’t quite grasp what they are or how to deal with them. Worse, all his well-meaning male friends don’t know how to discuss emotions at all; their way of handling Andy’s broken heart is to awkwardly sit around at bars and drink, avoiding the topic as long as they can because none of them understand how to deal with or talk about feelings.

This is a stock cliché.

Look. Are some men like that? Sure. But most aren’t, especially in 2025. Most men can discuss deep emotions, they’re in touch with themselves on some significant level, even if not as in touch as most average women. It really depends on the individual. Of course I may be a bit of an outlier…but not by that much. With almost every woman I’ve ever dated, I’ve generally been the one more in touch with and open about my feelings. (Granted, I am not the norm.)

But it wasn’t just that the male POV felt sort of cliché and stock and wooden; it was also that Jen, the ex, seemed so incredibly wise beyond her words, especially with regards to emotion. It felt like a very common trope: Women = emotional and good with feelings; men = clueless and lost, disconnected from their emotions. And while broadly speaking I do think there’s some general truth to this idea, I don’t think it’s as simple and black-and-white as it’s portrayed in this novel. And good novels, if anything, are all about the exploration of nuance and complexity, authenticity and non-binary ideas.

Another thing that bothered me, though, was the smuggling in of feminist tropes and ideology.

She’d have Andy say something or think something which was supposed to be him realizing how shitty men are sometimes and how good and wise women are. Or Jen would come to terms about something regarding men and we’re clearly, as readers, supposed to applaud. That felt patronizing to me, as if the author were trying to spoon-feed us her ideology. I don’t like that, even when it’s ideology I may happen to agree with.

In my view: This doesn’t belong in serious fiction. Essays, Op-Eds, memoirs, nonfiction articles, sure. But not novels. An author’s job in a novel isn’t to cast judgment on the characters but to display scenarios, to show human beings being messy and chaotic as we are in real life. Many questions, no answers. Art is not for answers. That’s science, tech, politics.

The writing itself was very, very basic. Almost sadly basic. It reminded me a bit, the whole novel—not in terms of plot, obviously, but in terms of writing style and syntax and pace and reading tone—of 2015’s The Girl on The Train, a sticky but fairly silly page-turner that the journalist-turned-author, Paula Hawkins, admits she wrote very quickly to make a buck. (Which she did. Connections get you a lot in the trad book biz.)

And yet then again: I can’t totally dismiss Alderton’s novel. Like I said: Andy and Jen, though sometimes stock cliches in my view, DO still bring life to the page. The breakup itself and many of the emotions that follow feel quite authentic. I even felt emotional a few times, remembering some of my own breakups in the past before I was married. The neediness, the loneliness, the desperation, the spiritual anguish, the worrying that you’ll be on your own forever, thinking you’ll never meet anyone ever again, feeling like a loser, full of shame and self-pity. That is very relatable. It’s part of the human experience.

And I have to give credit to any author who can make you keep needing to turn the pages, even if you don’t respect the book as much as you’d like. It’s like being a true-blue punk rocker and having mixed feelings about new Green Day. You know you’re supposed to hate it (corporate sellout crap, right?) and yet sometimes, when you’re alone in your car and you have a while, you can’t help but put the record on and play it loud, singing the lyrics to every song, pounding your fist. That happens with fiction because the author knows how to sprinkle just enough realism and authenticity into the mix, along with as many writers’ plot and character tricks as possible to make you keep going.

On a certain level—as an author myself—I get and respect this. And yet, for me, the core of a novel, in the end, is about meaning and depth. Though we certainly navigate challenging emotions in this novel, I didn’t feel like we interacted with fully-fleshed out, completely believable characters. The novel was less like a golden spiritual prize (which is what I felt reading Intermezzo and All Fours) and more like eating a really sugary piece of cake; rich and good in the moment, but you regret it later. (And the sugar is what draws you in.)

Ultimately, I wanted more depth, a male character that felt more fully human and expansive versus the limited idea some women have today of men and how they think.

In the end, I’d give the novel roughly a 6/10. Maybe 6.5. Not terrible. Not brilliant. Should it have been on the Top 10 Best Novels of 2024 NYT List?

No. I don’t think so. They should have switched it out for Intermezzo.

Is the novel worth reading? Sure. If you’re looking for a serious, deep read; find something else. If you’re looking for a fun semi-deep, intricate-yet-somewhat myopic read, go with Good Material.