In ‘Exciting Times,’ Echoes of Sally Rooney, but With a Queer Twist - The New York Times

EXCITING TIMES
By Naoise Dolan

Already drawing comparisons to Sally Rooney’s work, “Exciting Times,” by Naoise Dolan, has many of the familiar tropes of the “millennial novel” covered: Jealousy and obsession, love and late capitalism, sex and the internet all come whirling together in a wry and bracing tale of class and privilege.

The protagonist, Ava, is an intelligent, 22-year-old loner who moves from her native Dublin to Hong Kong to teach English, with no discernible qualifications other than being white. Not long after her arrival, she finds herself on a lunch date with Julian, an Oxford-educated British banker in his late 20s. She hopes he’ll be as impressed by her youth and attractiveness as she is by his salary, which she has Googled, thoroughly. “I wasn’t good at most things but I was good at men,” Ava confides in the reader, “and Julian was the richest man I’d ever been good at.”

Soon they are sleeping together, and Ava moves into Julian’s flat. She is highly attuned both to the power dynamics at play (“do you want me to depend on you?” she asks him) and to her moral predicament, as she adds up how much money she is saving on rent, as well as on the clothes and meals Julian pays for with the funds he doesn’t know what to do with.

Ava admires how Julian handles his advantages, how “he could calmly note where he benefited from unfairness — not self-indulgently like I often did, but factually.” As their undefined relationship goes on, she begins to develop her own brand of romantic longing, which begins with a desire for his life of privilege. “I loved him — potentially,” she thinks. “That, or I wanted to be him.”

Ava is hyper-verbal and exacting, and Dolan’s writing excels when Ava turns her analytical eye on the intersections between English syntax, zeitgeist technology and interpersonal relationships: “Because I lacked warmth, I was mainly assigned grammar classes, where children not liking you was a positive performance indicator. I found this an invigorating respite from how people usually assessed women.”

By contrast, Ava’s written correspondences — social media posts and emails she labors over, analyzes, doesn’t send or sends by accident — become increasingly vulnerable in their disclosures as the book moves along. They form a digital counterbalance to Ava’s aloof and guarded in-person presence, and through this duality Dolan captures perfectly the nauseating insecurity of growing up today.

Yet like many millennials, Ava exhausts the bulk of her mental energy on her bank account. “You’re not easily pleased with how other people put sentences together,” Julian accuses, “but when it comes to money, you’ve got no taste. And no squeamishness — about asking for it, discussing it, hoarding it.” Ava doesn’t flinch. The novel is shot through with moments of such startling self-awareness as this.

While Julian is back in London for six months, Ava meets Mei Ling “Edith” Zhang, a corporate lawyer from a well-off Hong Kong family. Edith has much in common with Julian: an Oxbridge pedigree and a high-powered, high-paying job. “I wanted her life,” Ava thinks. “I worried this might endanger our friendship, but so far it seemed to be facilitating it.”

Their friendship eventually moves through phases of awkward flirtation into a romantic affair, taking place mostly in Julian’s apartment, and in secret, as Edith is not out to her parents. But Julian’s impending return means Ava must decide not so much between her lovers as between Edith and the expensive flat that she doesn’t pay for. Sure, her salary is “good compared to the locals’,” but ending things with Julian would mean she’d have to, gasp, live like they do, “in coffin homes.”

The novel takes place a few years after the 2014 Umbrella Movement, peaceful demonstrations that galvanized Hong Kong’s youth, who were demanding open elections, in a renewed spirit of protest. Unfortunately, Dolan’s superficial evocation of the island is conjured mostly through Instagram latte art geotagged on fashionable streets. The actual experiences of local people her age have no effect whatsoever on Ava, the details of their lives mentioned, by the author, only in passing. Absent the textures of a real city that is sharply divided along generational, ideological and class lines, Dolan’s novel could have taken place in any other major Asian metropolis. None of the English-speaking characters seek to venture beyond their established social circles, where even brief references to elections or the conditions of domestic workers are dismissed as “white savior-ish.” They barely notice the Chinese characters on street signs, let alone try to understand them.

Those who’ve spent time in Hong Kong can’t help wondering what it’s like to be among the Anglophone transplants who work and party there. Are they as insensitive and indifferent as they seem to the foreign city they call home? The answer “Exciting Times” seems to offer is yes, in this case they are just as shallow and myopic as one would assume. After a local waiter replies to her English greeting in Cantonese, an irritated Edith points out one of Ava’s blind spots: “You’re not noticing because you’re white,” she says, “people see me and assume I’m from here.” Edith might let Ava off the hook, but why should today’s reader do the same?

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In ‘Exciting Times,’ Echoes of Sally Rooney, but With a Queer Twist - The New York Times
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