Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
A millennial Irish ex-pat who becomes involved in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer is the subject of an intimate, bracingly clever debut novel. Ava, who recently moved to Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days instructing wealthy kids in English. Banker Julian is. A banker who enjoys spending money on Ava, having sex with her, and talking to her about changing exchange rates can only reply, “I like you a great deal,” when she asks if he loves her. present Edith. Lawyer Edith, who was born in Hong Kong, is attractive and ambitious. She takes Ava to the theatre and leaves her tulips in the corridor. Ava desires her and wants to be her.
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
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Julian then informs Ava through the letter that he will be returning to Hong Kong. Should Ava stay in her comfortable life with Julian or venture into uncharted territory with Edith? Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the huge freedoms and bigger uncertainties of modern love. It is politically aware, heartbreakingly real, and dryly humorous. Naoise Dolan analyzes the interpersonal and financial dealings that make up a life in elegant, simple words, establishing herself as a unique new voice.
It takes place in a non-Western setting (Hong Kong), has a morally dubious and, in my opinion, unreliable narrator, and attempts to shepherd the reader through the narrator’s uncertainty about her sexuality, class, and lack of ambition.
Ava is the “kept” FWB of a British banker named Julian when we first meet him, and he makes it very plain that he can take her or leave her. And despite her reservations about it—or perhaps precisely because of them—she decides to stay with him while instructing little Hongkongese children in English.
She is alienated from her coworkers and friends, and because she is an outsider in a culture that was also conquered by the British (she is Irish), she is able to distance herself from the people who are the source of her insecurity and feeling inadequate at home.
Then Edith, a Hongkongese woman who was born abroad, later returned, and is currently a lawyer, enters the picture. Julian is not anything like Edith. In contrast to Julian, she appears to truly care about Ava and thinks she is intriguing and worth pursuing. They connect by their common love of Hong Kong and their own pretensions, but throughout their friendship, Ava is unsure about Edith’s interest in women and, if she is, what that would mean for her relationship with Julian. It’s disorganized and difficult to understand until the last part of the book.
