Not a Lot of Fun
Rooney E. O’Dacted
NBRY 2025

I

n 2015, The Doubling Review ran a goodbye-to-all-that essay by Rooney E. O’Dacted, a young Irish writer, about her brief career as a university debater. “I hated almost everything,” she tells the reader on page two.

She performs her spoken-word pieces with her best friend and ex-lover, !, who is equally intellectual but gregarious where ? is shy and composed where ? is awkward.

O’Dacted explores the above in her debut novel, “Not a Lot of Fun,” out Tuesday.

For O’Dacted, like Tartt and Marquez, inverting the story turns prevention into inevitability. In another way, though, her novel is itself a complicated mixture of freshness and worldly sophistication.

Red has followed in her grandfather’s steps and become a doctor in “the City”.

Back in 1971, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer engaged in one of the most vicious chatshow rows of all time, as Mailer retaliated to Vidal’s description of him in the New York Review of Books as part of “M3”, a line Vidal drew from Henry Miller to Mailer to Manson, a group of men “conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed”. But in her novel, The Heels Tune, O’Dacted has found the lover beneath the bloodshed and fury. She wouldn’t be doing her job properly if the characters weren’t familiar.

Her husband is frustrated at this complication in his meticulously uncomplicated life, and can’t help thinking it’s all about him. It’s also interesting because once P meets A, a high percentage of the word count is spent on A’s attractive features.

Unfortunately, the first-person narrative, while most immediate of all points-of-view in fiction, works less well if the reader chafes inside that particular character’s skin.

She omits to mention the reason for this: the Cs’ house has been vandalized after P, a weather man, makes a transphobic comment on air, and they want B out of the way while they talk to the police. The magical elements–the sky monkey and the family ghosts–are little more than plot devices. They bog down conversation between characters and slow the action because not only is A’s speech described, but so are the actions of his face, eyes, hair, skin, muscles, tendons, and feet.

A clever and current book about a complicated woman and her romantic relationships.