Martina Hefter’s Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? has caused much argument in German literary circles. It won the country’s most influential fiction award in 2024, and quickly sold 80,000 copies. But critics were divided: Die Zeit compared the book’s seductive power to the love scammers it depicts, while Deutschlandfunk Kultur criticised its shallow characters and monotonous dialogue.

I was instantly drawn in by the premise: a feisty middle-aged dancer trolling romance scammers, only to connect with a Nigerian man on the other end of the phone. Juno is a ballet dancer whose obsessions with ageing, death and her body have crippled her personality. With her career waning and most of her time spent caring for her ailing husband, Jupiter, she yearns for meaning. But she’s depressed, full of unexamined anger and guilt. Everywhere, through her scathing lens, she sees decay and deception. Unable to sleep, she baits love scammers into conversation. “Go ahead and write to women who are dumb enough to fall for that,” she thinks. “The main thing is that I have a counterpart.”

But it’s unclear what she’s trying to achieve with her long, confusing responses to these men. She doesn’t toy with them, or tangle them in her own web, or waste their time. There’s no play, as she claims to want. And no conversation either, just baffling rants about her own weird issues. The men leave. Juno feels she’s been clever.

Eventually she meets Benu from Nigeria, also known as Owen_Wilson223. This friendship, framed as the heart of the story, never gets anywhere close to intimate or interesting because Juno isn’t genuinely interested in much beyond her ageing body and the movie Melancholia, which Hefter allows to carry far more symbolic weight than it should.

I wish Hefter had taken more time to untangle Juno from her source material. Perhaps because her characters have yet to bloom in her imagination, and to reveal their layers, contradictions, and subtext to the author, she spells out much that should go unsaid. “It was possible that she was the real Juno in these chats,” we’re told. Or “Juno asked herself whether the tattoos served a purpose for her, whether they were a substitute for something else.”

In her night-time chats with Benu, Juno touches on a range of topics: poetry, dancing, income inequality, food insecurity, Nigeria, but she never goes beyond a surface interrogation of these things. And, for all her books on Nigeria, she can’t see Benu as anything more than a conman. When he shares his plans for his future, her paranoia instantly takes over: he must be doing a long con and will soon need capital.

This doomed dynamic, had it been allowed to develop and unfold, might have lent nuance to Juno’s character, who is clearly devoted to Jupiter and whose life is full of interesting power imbalances. Instead, Hefter lets this opportunity slip away and keeps gesturing toward Juno’s ageing body, Jupiter’s impending death, all our deaths. In the final four pages, Juno’s internal change is spelled out – that life is about the rehearsals, not the stage. That she could’ve been Benu’s friend. That the melancholia is gone, but it all feels overwritten and underfelt.

Is there a subtext here that perhaps hasn’t carried over into translation? Am I reading a sharp critique of an oblivious white woman whose distrust of everyone around her, and her loathing of her ageing self, have blinded her to the offer of real friendship, simply because the unequal financial circumstances might mean she has to pay some money? In the end, I don’t believe that. Because, despite all that we know about Juno’s life and surface thoughts, we don’t get any sense of her singular nature (or Benu’s). And because I, a lover of despicable characters, and a middle-aged woman who shares all of Juno’s obsessions, was bored. Like Benu on the final page of the novel, I’ve already forgotten her.