Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Review of Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
“You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special - which is fair, who doesn’t - but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.”
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (2020).
Published by Ecco.
I found this book through Libby, which, surprisingly considering how new it was, didn’t have a waitlist of people wanting to read it for themselves. So while prepping for my vacation to Tennessee, I downloaded the audiobook and added it to my rotation of audiobooks for the week: Exciting Times, Crying in H Mart, and The Lying Life of Adults kept me intellectually fed the entire trip. But, to be quite honest, Zauner’s and Ferrante’s works had much greater success in capturing my attention compared to Exciting Times.
There’d been a lot of hype around this book. I think it was longlisted for some big book prize? I don’t remember which one exactly (editing me now confirms that it was the Women’s Prize in Fiction over in the UK), and it was often compared to the work of Sally Rooney.
I have not read Sally Rooney nor do I particularly care to in my current mindset. I added it to my Goodreads back when the longlist was announced because I was compelled by the cover. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but oh man the psychology of color really gets me over here. This cover was too aesthetically pleasing for me.
Anyways, I’ve rambled enough, so let’s get into this book review, shall we?
Book Blurb
An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer
Ava moved to Hong Kong to find happiness, but so far, it isn’t working out. Since she left Dublin, she’s been spending her days teaching English to rich children—she’s been assigned the grammar classes because she lacks warmth—and her nights avoiding petulant roommates in her cramped apartment.
When Ava befriends Julian, a witty British banker, he offers a shortcut into a lavish life her meager salary could never allow. Ignoring her feminist leanings and her better instincts, Ava finds herself moving into Julian’s apartment, letting him buy her clothes, and, eventually, striking up a sexual relationship with him. When Julian’s job takes him back to London, she stays put, unsure where their relationship stands.
Enter Edith. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her—and wants her. Ava has been carefully pretending that Julian is nothing more than an absentee roommate, so when Julian announces that he’s returning to Hong Kong, she faces a fork in the road. Should she return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith?
Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. In stylish, uncluttered prose, Naoise Dolan dissects the personal and financial transactions that make up a life—and announces herself as a singular new voice.
Content
I really wanted to like this book, but I just couldn’t. From the very beginning of the audiobook, the writing itself felt very slow and seemed to drag onwards, which made me concentrate less on the actual plot and characters. It was a battle to keep myself paying attention to this book, which was a shock compared to the other two books I was listening to at the time. But besides that, let’s dig deeper into why I’m not a fan of this book.
First, there is an inherent sense of colonialism when it comes to the setting itself, which, in turn, can be attributed to casual racism if the author isn’t careful. It doesn’t do the setting of Hong Kong justice, and there isn’t really a reason as to why it needs to be set there.
Asian women are stereotyped in the school setting (obedient, wearing uniforms, etc.) by the main character, and we get an archetype of the Tiger Mom in the novel itself. Our main characters are presumably white (that’s the impression I got) and live a privileged life abroad.
It’s a queer novel, but I couldn’t care less for the narrator and her plight or her love triangle. The book comes off as pretentious in the same vein as that one popular Moshfegh novel, more mainstream literature that has a somewhat unrelatable female protagonist that’s white living their best life around rich people.
Overall Thoughts
The writing is decent, it just comes across as very slow in this novel for me. I think this novel appeals to a very specific demographic, and I think it 100% has a definite PR campaign with the major magazines and editorial houses because I don’t understand why it has the press it does. All in all, I think I’m 100% the wrong demographic for this, but it comes across as shallow at the end of the day.
