![]() ![]() ![]() While the publisher’s synopsis of “Exciting Times” falls short, some critics have suggested a more obvious and tempting comparison. In fewer than 250 pages, the 28-year-old has captured the touchstone millennial tension between sardonicism and sincerity - the electric ambivalence of figuring out how to be a person in these times. A more conventional book of this description might be dreadful, but Dolan has something more interesting in mind. It would be unfair to judge the young Irish writer’s debut by its American jacket copy, which makes “Exciting Times” sound as if Candace Bushnell had appropriated a mundane subplot of “ Crazy Rich Asians.” Ava, an Irish transplant teaching English grammar to wealthy children in Hong Kong, starts sleeping with Julian, a wealthy English banker, but while he’s away on business she falls in love with Edith, a wealthy Hong Kong-born lawyer. Both intonations feel native to its 22-year-old narrator, Ava. The title of Naoise Dolan’s debut novel, “Exciting Times,” is a clever trick - an ambivalent phrase that reads one way in millennial deadpan, an additional way as an earnest expression. ![]()
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