JACK REVIEWS NOVELS to DISTRACT HIMSELF from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH: Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

OK, right, so I have no idea where to begin with this one. Maybe... OK. On the whole, I really liked Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. Also, there were many moments during the process of reading Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan that I thought “this book is really, really, really intensely annoying.” About two thirds of the way through this tremendously irritating novel, I realised to my surprise that A) I had made it two thirds of the way though this tremendously irritating novel, and B) I actually cared quite a lot what happened to the three main characters and was turning the pages compulsively. So you will see why this is quite a difficult review to start. From what angle do you approach a novel as baffling, frustrating and occasionally sublime?

I feel about Exciting Times how I think some people feel about Sally Rooney's writing. I am,a Sally Rooney acolyte. I have been profoundly moved by her writing, depressed and uplifted in equal measure, and would hector friends into reading her until the runaway success of Normal People made that quite unnecessary. But it has not escaped my attention that Sally Rooney has her critics. Some of those critics are Will Self and thus can be discounted immediately, but I've heard enough people say they find her characters vapid and self absorbed to understand that it's a legitimate opinion. A wrong opinion of course. They're vapid and self absorbed, in the way that most young people are vapid and self absorbed, but they're also funny and self deprecating and engaged in the messy process of being better people. If you don't like Sally Rooney's characters, you're probably being dishonest with yourself about the way you were in your late teens and early twenties.

But I digress. That's not the point. The point is that the characters in Exciting Times are, in fact, vapid and self absorbed. The book's narrator is Ava - Irish, in her early twenties, doing TEFL in Hong Kong, consumed by varying intensities of despair and self loathing. The plot centres around her love triangle that's not a love triangle, with English banker Julian, and Hong Kong born trainee solicitor Edith. Both are from wealthy backgrounds, while Ava is not. Ava loves and admires Edith, and... to be honest, I'm not sure what she feels about Julian. Like many aspects of this novel, I can't decide whether that's intentional, whether it's because their relationship is nuanced and complex, or needlessly vague. She sort of has a thinly disguised contempt for him but finds his company perversely enjoyable. They fuck semi regularly, and Ava doesn't particularly enjoy it, but doesn't outright dislike it either. They end up living together, an arrangement that more or less works. Julian is a reasonably likeable character and largely avoids the cliches of the privileged banker archetype. He's capable of self parody – at one point he suggests that he'd be more inclined to worship Jesus if he'd founded a start-up. At the same time, he's quite cold and ignorant, and actually, there just isn't much to him. He's not much of anything. He's a bit blank. This might be subtle characterisation from Dolan, it might be bad writing from Dolan, I don't know, I DON'T UNDERSTAND. THIS IS REALLY BLOODY HARD.

I don't understand why Ava loves Edith so much either. Again, she's not much of anything. During her first encounter, we learn that she carries soy milk cartons in her handbag, that she gets very animated when she attempts to explain Chinese geography to Ava on napkins, that she goes to watch plays and then spends her time in the theatre answering e-mails on her phone. Ava slowly becomes smitten. Why? It's not that Edith is unpleasant or anything, and she certainly cares more for Ava than Julian does. There are also glimpses of how Edith's eclectic range of enthusiasms could be charming. Take this sweet observation about Instagram - 

“she said Instagram made her look at everything more closely. Whenever she felt sad, she had a wall of happy memories to look back on.” 

Such sincerity runs counter from what you expect from a novel as frequently cynical as this one, and it does demonstrate that Edith brings something into Ava's life that she's missing. But again, on the whole, there's just not much there. Ava sleeps with Edith and marvels about how little room they take up in bed when their bodies are intertwined. She then observes that 

“she's just spent half a year having quite a lot of sex with a vertically bothersome man. It was all very interesting.” 

It's not. It sounds clever, means nothing. Everyone in this book is the sum total of the sarcastic quips and shallow personality quirks they're allowed. There's no depth to it. Dolan's writing captures the mechanics of liking someone and wondering whether they like you back, but the characters involved feel half formed, and so it's all not quite right. It's like watching incredibly impressive robots flirt.

But could that be the point? The running theme of Exciting Times is that Ava doesn't like herself and is committed to sabotaging her own happiness. She pronounces herself "a bad person" who “could not correctly process emotions.” 

Edith points out to her that 

“you keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special... but you won't allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you're especially bad.” 

It's quite wearisome spending the entirety of a novel in the head of someone like that. Perhaps it doesn't matter who Julian or Edith are as people, and Ava could pick two random strangers (or incredibly impressive robots) off the street and still find herself in the exact same impossible situation; living with someone she on one level despises, falling in love with someone else, and then doing her best to clog up the gears of their relationship. In that case, the vagueness surrounding Julian and Edith's personality makes sense. They're blank canvases for Ava to project her neuroses onto. There's a funny line when Ava sees a picture of a toddler in a mortar and gown at Edith's family home, and immediately (and incorrectly) assumes it's “Edith at a ceremony for child geniuses.” As long as she is capable of making Ava feel insecure and out of her depth, Edith can be absolutely anyone at all.

Anyway, the other key thing to point out is that there are lots of magnificent one liners and observations in Exciting Times. The problem is, roughly 75% of Dolan's sentences are trying so hard to be magnificent one liners and observations. You could flip to any page and find exquisite sentences. To prove my point, I used a random number generator to pick a page in the book. I got page 36, which features the following:

“That night I spent longer than usual pretending not to want him in ways that made it obvious I did. It wasn't as much fun as I usually found it, or as satisfying as I knew slicing a machete through a row of his shirts would be, but I enjoyed the clarity of the exercise.”

And then, the very next sentence is:

“There was something Shakespearean about imperious men going down on you: the mighty have fallen.”

And then, this dialogue at the bottom of the page:

“'In Victorian times,' I said, 'women cut off a lock of hair and gave it to men to keep.'
'I don't want your hair.' '
I'm just describing the practice.'
'Right. Good description. I still don't want your hair.'”

Now, all these excerpts are pretty brilliant. The image of Ava taking a machete to Julian's shirts is hilarious; the Shakespeare joke is oddly profound; the exchange about locks of hair is a winning example of the bone dry sense of humour that courses through this book. The problem, though, is that these sentences don't exist in isolation. They swim in a sea of other, similar sentences that are also trying to stop you in your tracks, on every, single, page. Every single character's voice is laden with this odd mixture of eloquence and expertly executed sarcasm. The cumulative effect is exhausting.

And yet. And yet. Exciting Times is special. It's distinctive, it's brave, it's like nothing else you'll read this year (obviously I think the comparison with Sally Rooney earlier is valid in the macro, but the experience of reading this and, say, Normal People is totally different).. It might be a work of genius. I'm almost certain it's not, but I'm not discounting the possibility. At times, Dolan's writing is exhilarating, and as abrasive as she is, Ava is so engaging that I suspect the texts I sent to my friends while I was reading Exciting Times sound a bit like her. She can be extremely funny; look out for the conversation at the start of Chapter. 15 when she tells her mother she's dating a banker. Or her rationale for not reading the poetry Julian wrote at university; 

“I was worried the poems would be bad and I'd have to keep living in his apartment.” 

Even the self loathing has its moments, such as her insistence that Julian finding her attractive is 

“a hideous miscalculation given that (I am) in fact the worst human on any conceivable axis.” 

And I don't want to discount all her sadness as mere navel gazing. For example, there's a heartbreaking observation about only wanting to be seen holding Edith's hand by people who won't hurt them for it. Even as one of those awful cis het white men they have now, lines like that always stop me in my tracks. The combined effect of all this, the jokes and the pain and the strangeness, is magnified by the curt chapter lengths. If you're like me, the effect of being able to blast through 10 chapters in 50 pages will be that you try and do exactly that. But perhaps this novel is best enjoyed in little fragments, one or two a day. That's the best way of appreciating each joke, each carefully crafted sentence, without the unrelenting intensity of Ava's voice wearing you down.

Ultimately, what I will say for Exciting Times is that there is not one single sentence in the book that is boring. The fact that Dolan is straining to do something quirky with every line is its most glaring flaw, but I'll always prefer a novel that is bad in interesting ways to a novel that is outright boring. And for all its faults, Exciting Times is a million miles away from a bad novel. It is addictive, laugh out loud funny, and curiously moving. If/when Naoise Dolan writes a new novel, I suspect I will buy it on the day of release. I just wish it wasn't such an effort to get to that realisation.