EXCITING TIMES

Craig Brown described the first half as containing ‘comic writing at the highest level’

NAOISE DOLAN

Weidenfeld, 275pp, £14.99, ebook £7.99

Many reviewers suggested that Ava, the wise-cracking self-hating twentysomething narrator of Naoise Dolan’s debut novel exciting times, belonged in Sally Rooney’s milieu, described in the Telegraph as made up of ‘young artistic types who have feelings, and belong in Dublin, wherever they are’. But Ava is darker and funnier than Rooney’s heroines and has travelled further – all the way to Hong Kong where she works as a TEFL teacher and lives and sleeps but doesn’t go out with a buttoned-up banker. The banker returns to London for a stint, leaving his non-girlfriend to fall in love with a Chinese-born Cambridge educated female lawyer. This leads to Ava having to make a choice which she appears, for most of the novel, incapable of doing.

In the Guardian Holly Williams praised the sharpness of the writing ‘but there are places where it feels overly cynical’. In the Literary Review John Maier took a generally dim view of Ava’s ‘infernal internal monologue’ but suggested that some readers would feel ‘recognised’ by the novel, and enjoy it for that reason. In the Mail on Sunday Craig Brown described the first half of the novel as containing ‘comic writing at the highest level’ and compared exciting times to Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers. But then something palled. ‘The gaps between jokes grew longer and longer… Ava’s self-lacerating cynicism, once so funny, lost its wit and became claustrophobic. Themes of colonialism and gender politics which had, up to then, been bubbling beneath the surface, began to be placed in the forefront…when satire jettisons its humour, it curdles into agitprop.’