Because she didn’t like herself in Ireland she believes that a change of scenery will either improve her personality or the way she sees herself. “The trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with me.”Īt 22 Ava decides to leave Dublin behind and move to Hong Kong where she ends up teaching English grammar. Still, Ava’s millennial despondency does seem to make her prone to bouts of lethargy and ennui. Her alienation comes across as a phase of sorts, something she was experiencing merely for the sake of the aesthetics. Ava, the protagonist of Dolan’s novel, is far less morbid than Plath’s or Moshfegh’s narrators.

The women who populate these novels have a lot in common with Esther Greenwood, who is perhaps the supreme example of the alienated female narrator (then again I think this title should go to Natalie Waite from Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman). It follows the tradition of the alienated young woman, which has regained traction over the past years, in no small part thanks to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While part of me rejoiced at the sight of quotations marks (yes, I’m looking at you Sally Rooney), I soon found myself wondering where the ‘wit’ I was promised was (in case you are wondering, largely MIA).Įxciting Times is an innocuous debut novel. Sadly, as with a lot of hyped new releases, Exciting Times wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. With so many professional reviewers hailing Exciting Times as one of the best debut novels of 2020, praising Naoise Dolan for her wit and her razor-sharp social commentary, or describing her book as being “droll, shrewd and unafraid”, this promised to be an intelligent and compelling read. If you didn’t have one then that left more room for everyone else’s.” “I felt I had hitherto woefully misdirected my energies in attempting to cultivate a personality.

Exciting times author