Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan review / A witty, deadpan debut

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Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan review – a witty, deadpan debut

A young Dubliner in Hong Kong struggles to connect in this fresh and funny debut about love and self-knowledge

Carrie O'Grady
Fri 17 Apr 2020 07.30 BST

A

va, a 22-year-old Dubliner living in Hong Kong, describes herself as “good at men”. It’s a brilliantly concise summation of her take on relationships, which she sees as a power game, an “ultimately shallow emotional transaction” in which the greatest potential benefit might be that you get to move into an apartment better than anything you can afford on your own. Julian, her posh banker boyfriend, has such an apartment – which is just as well, since he also has an arrogance to match his salary. “Why do you like me?” Ava asks him. “Who said I liked you?” he counters. His privilege is the invisible third party in the relationship. Ava makes it her mission to get him to admit some feelings for her, purely because it would give her the upper hand.

Naoise Dolan

Though this model of relationship-as-power-struggle is hardly new, Dolan brings a fresh 21st-century sensibility to it. Ava is constantly trying to make sense of her situation by framing it in terms of identity: does sleeping with Julian make her a bad feminist? Or a good girlfriend? In this, she’s reminiscent of Sally Rooney’s precarious young women, whose struggle for self-affirmation is so snarled up with the power dynamics of sex.

This model of relationship-as-power-struggle is hardly new, but Dolan brings a fresh 21st-century sensibility to it

Like Rooney, Dolan writes in a deadpan style. Sentences are short. Aperçus are withering. Emotions are dealt with baldly, dryly: “Anyway, I hated her,” says Ava about Victoria, a moneyed friend of Julian’s. Figures such as Victoria serve to generate much of the book’s caustic wit. “It was as if someone else ironed everything for her – her whole life,” Ava thinks, “and her role was to make new creases.” Dolan is also funny about Irishness, pointing out the irony of Ava having to teach her young ESL students how to aspirate the “th” in “things” when, as a Dubliner, she has gone 22 years without once pronouncing it herself.

An entire novel in this vein might become wearing, but Dolan takes her narrative to a new level when she brings in a character Ava actually likes: Edith, a local who went to boarding school in England. With Julian away, the women bond and Ava must interrogate herself over a whole new range of feelings. (How can you tell whether you like someone? When you not only stalk her on subreddits, but worry about whether the algorithm will reveal to her the true extent of your stalking.)

She and Edith are a love story, but also a fear story. Dolan skilfully reveals to us how Ava’s choices are all made with self-protection in mind: her constant irony, her low expectations, her chilly relationship with Julian. As Ava grapples with the newfound vulnerability Edith has exposed in her, she finds herself observing her own actions like a zoologist peering into a cage. “That’s good to know about me,” she thinks. “It’s good to know that’s how I behave in this situation.”

It’s not easy to sustain interest in someone so relentlessly floundering for self-knowledge, and the book flags once Ava and Edith are together. That’s partly because Edith herself is only lightly sketched in. She talks to Ava about Ava, and delivers the odd riff on her mother or Judy Garland, but we never delve deep into her own feelings or get to see her vulnerabilities exposed. As for Julian, he is a closed book – he wouldn’t fulfil his function in the storyline otherwise – and the rest of the characters, barring Ava’s hilariously frank Mam on the phone from Ireland, are similarly unforthcoming. This gives the novel a strangely solipsistic feel, like a hall of mirrors, where every attempt to gaze outward is met only by your own face. Ava is an accurately drawn emblem of the zeitgeist, but as such, she stands apart from it, isolated.

There are intimate moments here, even if they do occur at one remove. Nolan does a brilliant job of harnessing technology to her story, specifically the phone. Again, this recalls Rooney, who uses emails both sent and unsent as a potent fictional technique, and writes in Normal People that “the network is a form of intelligence in itself, containing them both, and containing their feelings for each other”. Dolan encapsulates this in a perfect image near the end of Exciting Times, when Ava is tensely watching the three little dots on her messaging app: “Edith is typing ...” reads her screen. It’s the closest we’ll ever come to telepathy: she realises Edith is thinking about her at that moment, and it changes everything. In a novel where human connection is such a challenge, these flickering pixels provide one of the most affecting and powerful moments.

• Exciting Times is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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