In My Days of Dark Green Euphoria, A.E. Copenhaver reworks the age-old clash of generations, placing that story in a contemporary setting just as Western civilisation appears ready to disappear up its own fundament in a puff of carbon-neutral, gender-neutral, offense-neutral smoke. Slyly and deftly, the author skewers millennials as the risk-averse generation that invented the safe space and baby boomers as correspondingly bewildered, having grown up with freedom, nature, and mortgages as givens. Dancing both beneath and above these raiments, Copenhagen’s characters weave an off-beat, ambiguous, and rather lovely story.

The novel has a deliciously subversive premise: Cara, a millennial eco-militant, so admires Millie, mother of her boyfriend Dan, that she ditches eating from dumpsters, fighting for animal rights, and juggling a series of pet-sitting assignments in favor of deepening their friendship. During Dan’s work trip abroad, instead of continuing her devotion to leaving exactly no trace on the planet, Cara throws herself into drinking cocktails, smoking cigarettes, getting pedicures, shopping at Target, and roaring about in Millie’s baby-blue vintage Lincoln “the size of a small yacht.” Cara’s life soon unravels; her ethical, environmentally-conscious career crashes, she loses a client’s Rover while high on magic mushrooms, and a cat dies on her watch.

The writing is good; sharp and knowing and at times beautiful. Cara is an engaging protagonist, funny and self-aware, as when she confesses that “the moment I met someone, I was carbon profiling them” and worries excessively about “marginalised Brown bodies and voices in the animal rights movement.” She routinely dismisses white people, including fellow activists, for failing to meet her impossibly rigorous yet ever-shifting standards for food, clothing, and travel. Cara reduces others to habits and practices—having children, killing spiders, tweeting about an ancient aspen that has not blossomed in forty years—that annoy and offend her. Yet there is an endearing quality to her fierce principles. Her immediate crushes — on Millie, a workmate, clients — hint of a yearning for real, human, even maternal, connection. But nothing is straightforward for Cara, who examines everything exhaustively through the prism of ethical principle. Even her attraction to her handsome boyfriend is a complex melange of lust and repulsion.

The thunderclap with which Cara and Millie meet is drolly drawn. Although Cara sees Millie as a glorious Mitford-esque femme du monde, she is, in fact, deeply ordinary, not to mention friendly, kind, and generous. Millie’s unawakened boomer attitudes—her mainstream views on travel, petrol, drinking, and eating dead animals for lunch—makes her, in Cara’s eyes, “the pure version of how children think of adults before they learn adults are also humans held together by the sinews of ugliness and fear, sadness and regret.” Millie offers Cara freedom from the gruelling rigor that informs her every choice, from toothpaste to career. In Millie’s company, Cara experiences relief: She “‘could not care, too, just like everyone else, and it felt fucking great.”

Cara’s job requires her to watch ghastly scenes of animals being tortured, separated screaming from their young, and horribly slaughtered. No wonder she seeks something, anything, to distract and soothe her. As Cara searches urgently for peace and happiness, Copenhaver takes the reader on on a wild ride. Alongside Cara, we embark on a rollercoaster of eco-lectures, intimate and excruciatingly honest self-examinations, swift and brutal judgements, and a torrent of naïve desire to make a difference.

With her career and relationships in tatters, Cara falls back on a therapist’s suggestion which at first felt “phony, vaguely sexual, intimate inappropriate.” In fact, it is a sweet and breathtakingly simple answer to Cara’s problems, one that defies trends and generations, and provides Cara with what she needs to begin living. We leave Cara with her hands plunged into the earth, finally part of the great mass of imperfect and contradictory humans who surround her. It is a lesson which, in these unreal times, we must hope it is not too late for us all to learn.

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