In pursuing a relationship with Julian, Ava also becomes a reluctant participant in the social life of his friends, a group of cantankerous British expatriates. These were largely average circumstances for many Irish citizens during the recession, certainly in part because of the actions of banks like his own. It’s not that her family is especially poor, she reminds him. After they have sex, Ava tells him about Ireland post-2008, when she shared a room with her brother so as to rent out the second bedroom. The imbalance of power in their relationship is not only interpersonal: he asks whether her accent is “posh” where she comes from, and balks when she says she has never been to London, despite having never traveled to Dublin himself. Ava keeps Julian company and moves into the spare bedroom of his expensive apartment all the while, she silently wonders about his feelings toward her. The novel probes these questions through the lens of Ava’s romantic relationships: in Hong Kong, Ava’s loneliness draws her to stolid Julian, a British Eton- and Oxford-educated banker, and they establish an intimate but undefined relationship. For example: what makes one variety of English correct or incorrect? There’s no precise answer, but one’s response reveals multitudes about one’s own relationship to class, race, and empire. These performative one-liners notwithstanding, Dolan is at her best when she chooses to closely engage with questions of language, and the ways one’s linguistic identity is transformed when living as an expatriate.
In an effort to capture millennial ennui, Dolan frequently takes a disaffected tone, holding her protagonist, and her leftist politics, at a distance. Indeed, the book is populated by similar quips meant to signal the protagonist’s own self-awareness. In Naoise Dolan’s debut novel, Exciting Times, twenty-two-year-old Irish expat Ava gets a job at a TEFL school in Hong Kong, where she is encouraged to correct children who use common features of Hong Kong English-like adding “lah” for emphasis (“no lah”) the way that Irish people add “sure.” In reality, she’s been hired to teach British English, something that she’s no more qualified to do than a local English speaker-except that she’s white, and works at an institution that “only hired white people but made sure not to put that in writing.” It was here that I began to grow suspicious-in a book filled with such terse and intelligent writing, I feared this type of off-the-cuff virtue signaling would characterize the entirety of Dolan’s novel.
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