Among the many complaints from why-oh-whying critics about last month’s Granta list of best young British novelists (sorry if you’re sick of the subject) was the absence of the Irish writers Naoise Dolan, Michael Magee and Sally Rooney. While historians probably have a better word for that kind of inclusivity, the slightly bizarre consensus could also be seen as an uncomplicated tribute to the fact that so many of the best recent novels in English have come from Ireland.
One of them was Dolan’s debut, Exciting Times, a tart comedy about a millennial Dubliner caught up in a bisexual love triangle while teaching English in Hong Kong. Her new novel, set largely in present-day Dublin, confirms her talent while giving cause for regret that she’s shed a few spikes since her first outing, although it’s hardly a shock to find the title isn’t to be taken at face value.
The couple in question are mid-to-late twentysomethings Celine, a concert pianist, and Luke, a PR guy for a global tech company. He’s a serial shagger who craves approval but doesn’t know what to do with it, while she’s independent-minded and dedicated to her art yet somehow unable to contemplate life alone. We join them just when – in a typically convincing exchange – they’ve suddenly talked themselves into getting hitched because neither can face breaking up.
We follow them from this awkward engagement to the big day via five points of view: theirs as well as Celine’s sister, Phoebe, and Luke’s Oxford pals Archie and Vivian, both of whom he’s slept with. En route there’s abundant shilly shallying about whether marriage is actually what the central characters want, though both circle the question – even after Luke goes awol from his own engagement party, only to be tracked down in a hotel bar several G&Ts deep with Celine’s ex Maria.
That alone has potential to sink the relationship, but The Happy Couple’s energy consists largely in making you want to shake the characters into more sensible decisions. Hate the game, not the players, Dolan seems to say, putting society in the dock. One of the chapters in Celine’s portion of the narration breaks off into a summary of all the culture she’s been exposed to; up to age 12, we’re told, she read 378 books “where women date or marry men”, and none “where women date or marry women”. The segment ends: “She’s not an idiot. She’s just been carefully taught.” Even Luke, drafting his wedding speech the night before while still undecided whether he’s going to turn up, asks himself why Celine hasn’t already called it off: “Answer: heteronormativity is a near-ubiquitous form of mania.”
Like the novels of Rooney and another Irish writer, Niamh Campbell (We Were Young), Dolan’s narratives are casually bisexual, cracking open marriage-plot narratives – less love triangle, more sex pentangle – with bed-hopping that’s neither transgressive nor redemptive but simply a fact of life. There’s a political frisson to that, for sure, but also a certain frictionlessness, at least in this novel, which brings the unpalatable thought that what’s good for life – shame, begone – isn’t always great for fiction. But maybe millennial Irish fiction seeks its guilt elsewhere anyhow; you can hear an echo of the anxiety driving Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You when Luke sulks that his fiancee’s art depends on workers living “in conditions ranging from breadline to slavery so Celine can play the piano”.
The send-up is implicit – what we’re witnessing most of all is Luke’s ludicrous talent for self-exculpation – but in the end, this is a warm and sympathetic novel, ready to let even its worst offenders off the hook. The problem is that where the moment above lands with psychological crunch, Dolan more often uses her wit simply to parcel out insights and provocations among her cast rather than using them to build personalities we really care about. Even the novel’s form – ever ready to break into a cute numbered list or a series of three- and four-word chapters – comes to seem like corner-cutting. Funny and direct, it nonetheless leaves you with not a lot; at least we enjoy the ride, which most of the time seems to be more than the characters can say.
• The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan is published by W&N (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
