Edith has much in common with Julian: an Oxbridge pedigree and a high-powered, high-paying job. While Julian is back in London for six months, Ava meets Mei Ling “Edith” Zhang, a corporate lawyer from a well-off Hong Kong family.
The novel is shot through with moments of such startling self-awareness as this. And no squeamishness - about asking for it, discussing it, hoarding it.” Ava doesn’t flinch. “You’re not easily pleased with how other people put sentences together,” Julian accuses, “but when it comes to money, you’ve got no taste. Yet like many millennials, Ava exhausts the bulk of her mental energy on her bank account. They form a digital counterbalance to Ava’s aloof and guarded in-person presence, and through this duality Dolan captures perfectly the nauseating insecurity of growing up today. “That, or I wanted to be him.”īy contrast, Ava’s written correspondences - social media posts and emails she labors over, analyzes, doesn’t send or sends by accident - become increasingly vulnerable in their disclosures as the book moves along. She is highly attuned both to the power dynamics at play (“do you want me to depend on you?” she asks him) and to her moral predicament, as she adds up how much money she is saving on rent, as well as on the clothes and meals Julian pays for with the funds he doesn’t know what to do with.Īva admires how Julian handles his advantages, how “he could calmly note where he benefited from unfairness - not self-indulgently like I often did, but factually.” As their undefined relationship goes on, she begins to develop her own brand of romantic longing, which begins with a desire for his life of privilege. Soon they are sleeping together, and Ava moves into Julian’s flat. “I wasn’t good at most things but I was good at men,” Ava confides in the reader, “and Julian was the richest man I’d ever been good at.” She hopes he’ll be as impressed by her youth and attractiveness as she is by his salary, which she has Googled, thoroughly. Not long after her arrival, she finds herself on a lunch date with Julian, an Oxford-educated British banker in his late 20s. The protagonist, Ava, is an intelligent, 22-year-old loner who moves from her native Dublin to Hong Kong to teach English, with no discernible qualifications other than being white. Already drawing comparisons to Sally Rooney’s work, “Exciting Times,” by Naoise Dolan, has many of the familiar tropes of the “millennial novel” covered: Jealousy and obsession, love and late capitalism, sex and the internet all come whirling together in a wry and bracing tale of class and privilege.
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