When thirty-year-old poet-slash-legal-counsel Max falls down the stairs practically sober at a New Year’s Eve party, her night in hospital becomes the catalyst for major personal changes. First thing’s first: she gets back on the apps, ventures out of her queer-world bubble and gives heteronormativity the good old college try.
Following on from her widely acclaimed debut Bellies – a seductive love story following Tom and Ming through Ming’s transition – Nicola Dinan has returned with an incisive second novel. Sharply observed and riveting, Disappoint Me asks what we can ever truly know about ourselves and others.
Having developed a protective dating app policy of waiting for men to swipe right on her and then filtering out the outwardly dodgy ones, Max soon meets Vincent, a fellow lawyer with Chinese heritage, and embarks on a romance with the potential to reshape her world. Drawn into this dynamic is Simone, a fashion model scout and Max’s best friend, and the unspeakably posh but seemingly well-intentioned Fred, Vincent’s friend since childhood and the source of much of his angst.
Split into two timelines, the novel both follows Max as she embarks on her relationship with Vincent in the present, and tracks Vincent in Thailand in 2012, where he is enamoured with a beautiful woman called Alex who has a private history of her own.
Much of Disappoint Me is concerned with dichotomies: between what the characters do and “should” want, what they have done and what they should have done. Max herself is bound up in ambiguity, not only in her relationship with Vincent and his world, but also when it comes to her family and the things they don’t talk about. Then there is the guilt she feels for the sense that her body is a burden, something that keeps her forever on the outside, when she has “tried so hard to be proud.”
Her depiction of queer and trans friendships, with all their fierce loyalties and shifting tides, are particularly well-rendered. It’s a fine line to walk between over-explaining transness for a cis audience and disregarding the realities of a trans life, and Dinan skillfully balances on this knife’s edge in her depiction of Max’s touchpoints and insecurities. There is no turning away from Max’s discomfort as she tries to figure out where she fits in Vincent’s more heteronormative world, and as their relationship progresses Dinan strips away each person’s many layers in co-ordinated blows.
After a certain point, one wonders how many misfortunes can befall a single group of people, but it is a mark of Dinan’s skill that the novel never feels tough going. Disappoint Me is not yet another example of the “trauma plot” phenomenon – each hardship illuminates another aspect of the characters’ inner lives, either among themselves or to the reader.
Yet there are times when you wish that all these misdeeds would not land so lightly. We move on a little too swiftly, for example, from Simone’s eventual professional fall from grace and public skewering.
Having left Max questioning her security in her relationship and in the world, Vincent also gets off easy. It is disappointing to see him essentially given the last word, a finality he perhaps does not deserve and one which deflates the careful narrative balance of the novel. However, there is something to be said for the cis male character to be waiting for a woman to strike back with the decisive blow. In the end, it is Max who has the power – it would just be nice to see her wield it.
Still, this is a tautly written novel which excavates the spaces between appearance and reality. If Nicola Dinan’s Bellies announced her as a major new talent, in Disappoint Me she delivers on this promise.
Published by Doubleday on 23 January, £16.99
Liam Konemann is the author of ‘The Appendix: Transmasculine Joy in a Transphobic Culture’, out now
