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

I’m sorry. I really am. I know it’s frustrating that any new young female writer must find themselves compared to Sally Rooney. But I’m going to just get it out of the way, for Naoise Dolan is Irish, in her mid-20s, and her debut was previewed in literary magazine The Stinging Fly while Rooney edited it. But on this occasion, it’s more than just a question of biography: Dolan’s writing does genuinely occupy similar territory. There’s a certain dry, almost deadpan quality in her observation of the lives of her twentysomething characters – the complications of attraction, and the gap between what’s felt and what’s spoken; calmly articulated self-loathing, and precise capturing of class differences – that both authors nail down dead.

So lucky us, really. Exciting Times is a fun, snappy read – ordinarily, I’d say its short chapters could be torn through on your commute, but it’ll brighten lockdown too.

Ava is a 21-year-old who leaves Ireland, where she’s convinced everyone hates her, to become a teacher of English as a foreign language in Hong Kong. Despite the chip on her shoulder, she falls in with Julian, an Eton-educated English banker who she enjoys being with because they (supposedly) aren’t that interested in each other: “It wasn’t like normal friendships where I worried if the other person still liked me.” She moves into his swanky apartment, rent-free, and they have sex. “I enjoyed his money and he enjoyed how easily impressed I was by it.”

If in part one, Ava feels held at a frustrating distance – why is she so hard on herself? What does she see in this man? – in part two, we watch her coming into the light. And also coming out: Ava slowly falls for Edith, a Hong Kong lawyer. Edith is curious and enthusiastic, and Ava can no longer maintain her detached, “ironical” approach to life – feelings flower all over the place. Feelings for Edith but, confusingly, also for Julian. They trip her up and get in the way.

Exciting Times is very funny in its cool observation and the way it takes us inside Ava’s spirals of overthinking. Dolan’s writing is extremely sharp – both cutting and tart – but there are places where it feels overly cynical. Ava eventually comes to recognise that her cynicism is the protective garb of youth, but it is something the book also struggles to shrug off.

Dolan seasons the novel with insights about class, gender, race, colonialism, and language, though the result does not always bring depth of flavour. The most insightful – and raw – of these are the caustic observations about Ireland’s repressive attitudes to homosexuality and abortionand how they damage individual lives.

It all adds up to a bracing, refreshing first novel, with hints of greater things to come.