Madeleine Dunnigan’s debut novel is as much about the scrim as it is the character-based light shining through it.
Published
There is a moment, early in Madeleine Dunnigan’s Jean, when the world seems to tilt. An unsettling stillness suggests that something, or someone, might slip away without a trace. Instability, emotional or otherwise, is ambient. In conversation, Dunnigan often returns to the idea of disappearance, not just as something that happens, but a slow accumulation of forces that render departure both inevitable and incomprehensible. “At its heart,” she says, the book has always been about “this person Jean, and why he chose to do that.”
But Jean resists the neatness of that question. The novel dwells inside the conditions that make reason feel insufficient. What emerges is a study of family, loss, and the fragile, often misaligned ways people attempt to love one another—particularly boys, who are given neither the language nor the permission to do so cleanly.
In Jean, Dunnigan traces the restless interior of a boy who feels himself both too much and not enough for the world that contains him. Exiled to a strange English boarding school for misfits, Jean moves through its sun-dappled fields and shadowed rooms like a fault line, his violence, longing, and sharp, searching intelligence flickering against one another. He is drawn to Tom, whose presence opens a fragile possibility of connection even as it sharpens Jean’s awareness of his own difference: his class, his Jewishness, his past, the unnamed thing inside him that pulses between cruelty and desire. Around them, authority figures speak in the language of care, God, and improvement, but the boys’ lives unfold in quieter, more ambiguous currents, shared cigarettes by the lake on campus, bodies in proximity, social cruelty tinged with the most intimate private moments.
The novel inhabits this liminal space with a cool, lucid intensity, where beauty and harm are indistinguishable at the edges, and where Jean, suspended between escape and belonging, moves toward something he cannot yet name but already fears he might destroy.
Dunnigan is wary of labels, especially those that flatten a novel into a marketable category. Though Jean has been positioned as a queer coming-of-age story, she insists that queerness is only one facet of a broader interior landscape. “It’s not just that Jean is queer,” she explains. “It’s that he feels other… and that otherness comes from many things.” This distinction matters. Jean’s queerness does not function as a singular axis of identity but as one pressure among many, alongside class, Jewishness, neurodivergence, and a more ineffable sense of estrangement from the world around him.
That estrangement begins, as it often does, at home.
The family in Jean is not broken in any spectacular or easily diagnosable way. There is no singular villain, no act that can be isolated as the point of fracture. Instead, Dunnigan constructs what she describes as “an absolute, unique collision of forces”—a system in which each member loves imperfectly, and those imperfections accumulate into something like inevitability. Rosa, Jean’s mother, loves him, but not in the way he needs. Jean, in turn, seeks love in places where he cannot quite believe in its possibility. The result is not neglect, exactly, but misalignment: a series of near-misses that, over time, take on the weight of loss.
What makes this dynamic so devastating is Dunnigan’s refusal to assign blame. She is explicit about this in our conversation: she does not want the reader to leave thinking that any one character is at fault. The tragedy of Jean is structural rather than moral. It emerges from timing, context, and the limitations of human understanding. In this sense, the novel quietly dismantles the comforting fiction that families fail because of individual failings. Instead, it suggests that sometimes they fail because they are composed of people, each with their own needs, blind spots, and internal logics; people who try and fail at meeting each other where they’re at, so to speak. The overall feeling is tragedy through accumulation, which is somehow more impactful than a direct story of love and loss because it so clearly reflects the damage inflicted by normative dynamics on sensitive people.
This idea extends outward into the novel’s treatment of loss. Loss in Jean is not confined to death or disappearance; it permeates the everyday. It exists in the gap between what is felt and what can be expressed, between what is desired and what is permissible. Jean’s world is one in which meaning is constantly deferred or distorted, particularly in his relationship with Tom.
The dynamic between Jean and Tom is one of the novel’s most precise and painful constructions. It is, on its surface, a familiar configuration: two boys circling one another in a space where intimacy is both possible and forbidden. But Dunnigan complicates this familiarity by attending closely to the asymmetry of their experience. For Jean, every gesture, every word, carries immense significance. It is imbued with the possibility of another life, another reality in which his feelings might be reciprocated and recognized. For Tom, by contrast, those same gestures exist in a kind of suspended meaninglessness. They are real, but not consequential. When the two talk about running away to China together, Tom sees it as a fun romp, Jean sees it as a permanent way to abscond from the weight of the world. These fantasies do not threaten the future Tom assumes he will have—a wife, children, a life that conforms to expectation—while for Jean, they’re all he has.
“Tom’s operating in a world where actions and words don’t have the significance that Jean experiences them to have,” Dunnigan notes. This discrepancy is the engine of the novel’s exploration of unrequited love. It is not simply that Jean loves Tom and Tom cannot love him back. It is that they inhabit entirely different systems of meaning. Jean reads their interactions as charged, as potentially transformative; Tom experiences them as fleeting, contained within a space that does not extend into the future.
And so this love is not just unrequited, defined by one party’s rejection of the other; it’s about the many ways misrecognition can exist between one another, only stoked by social inequity. Jean is not only unloved in the way he hopes to be; he is also unseen in the depth of his feeling. This is what gives the relationship its particular cruelty. It is not overtly violent, nor even consistently unkind. It exists instead in a gray zone, a “twilight” where affection and cruelty blur, where intimacy can coexist with indifference.
This gray zone is, as Dunnigan suggests, historically specific. Set in the mid-1970s, the novel captures a moment before the language of queer identity had fully entered mainstream discourse. In this context, the behaviors between boys—teasing, touching, a kind of coded intimacy—are both normalized and stripped of explicit meaning. They can occur without being named, and because they are unnamed, they are also deniable. For Jean, this ambiguity is unbearable; for Tom, it is enabling.
If the novel is attentive to the ways boys are shaped by these constraints, it is equally attuned to how they navigate them. Dunnigan resists the contemporary shorthand of “boys will be boys,” instead tracing how behaviors that might read as cruelty can function simultaneously as survival mechanisms. “Teasing is a weapon and a shield for the boys. It’s their language of participating in a social order that might otherwise exclude or expose you,” she says.
What is striking is how little sentimentality Dunnigan allows into this portrayal. There is tenderness, certainly, but it is always complicated by the structures that make tenderness difficult to sustain. This is particularly evident in Jean’s own attempts to process his emotions, which often manifest through acts of violence—not gratuitous, but somewhat sporadic; like flicking the pop take on a heavily shaken soda can. As Dunnigan explains, these moments are less about aggression than about confronting the “disgusting humanness” that emerges when one is forced into proximity with life in its most raw form.
Here, again, the novel returns to its central concern: how people manage feelings that exceed their capacity to articulate them. Jean’s difficulty with language—his inability to fully translate his internal world into words—necessitates a different kind of narrative approach. Dunnigan’s prose operates as a kind of intermediary, a “filter” through which Jean’s experiences can be rendered without pretending that he himself could articulate them in the same way. The effect is a voice that feels both intimate and slightly estranged, mirroring Jean’s own relationship to his emotions.
“I was actually having a really interesting conversation earlier about this idea,” says Dunnigan with regard to filters. “I think in words; that is almost exclusively my internal world. And Jean does not. His internal world is made up of sentences because language is the common parlance, even though it's actually para-language, and everything around his reality, that makes us understand someone else, or understand a character. A lot of the reflection he has, Jean wouldn’t ever use that language himself, the language is just a filter for his feelings and his expressions.”
If Jean is, ultimately, a novel about loss, it is also a novel about the limits of understanding. Dunnigan resists the impulse to resolve her characters’ contradictions or to impose coherence where there is none. Instead, she embraces what she calls the “shimmering” quality of possibility—the sense that things could have gone differently, even as they unfold in the only way they can.
“Rosa loves Jean, but the way she loves him is not the way he needs to be loved. Jean wants to love Tom, but he self-sabotages because he can’t really believe in a frame of reference to understand that love, so it becomes a verboten love. Tom probably loves Jean, but also sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes teenagers are fickle,” Dunnigan says, laughing. “That’s what I hoped to capture in the novel. It’s all these different possibilities, the reader can see all of them, and they have to sit with that.”
This is perhaps the novel’s most unsettling proposition: that the outcomes we experience are both contingent and inevitable. That within the same set of circumstances, multiple futures might be imaginable, but only one will come to pass—and that this outcome will not necessarily be the result of choice or intention, but of an intricate interplay of forces beyond any single character’s control.
In this sense, Jean offers a quiet rebuttal to the idea that love, whether familial or romantic, is inherently redemptive. Love, in Dunnigan’s rendering, is as likely to wound as it is to heal. It is shaped by context, constrained by circumstance, and often misdirected despite its sincerity. “Different kinds of love… break people,” she observes, “or hurt people, like inadvertently.”
What lingers after reading Jean is not a sense of resolution but of recognition. Not of specific experiences, necessarily, but of the patterns that underlie them: the miscommunications, the missed connections, the quiet accumulations of feeling that shape a life. It is a novel that does not ask to be solved, only to be sat with.
And in that sitting, with its discomfort, its ambiguity, its refusal of easy answers, Jean achieves something rare. It becomes not just a story about loss, but an experience of it.
