I first read Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times (2000) three years ago, about a year after the paperback came out. I enjoyed the read, but with reservations, and I thought it unlikely that I’d want to write about it. I read it for a second time at the end of March this year and began to get a vague idea of what I might want to say if I were to write something. So, to try to clarify that idea, I read the book a third time a few days ago. I’m still not sure whether I want to write about it.

The central character is Ava, a Dubliner in her early 20s who goes to work as a TEFL teacher in Hong Kong, where she spends at least half of her relatively low income “renting a tiny room with people who hate me” (p. 68). (Compare the living conditions of Eileen in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You published the following year.) Fairly soon, Ava has befriended an Oxford-educated English banker who lives in a spacious and expensive 50th-floor apartment in Mid-Levels. She gives up her rented room and moves into the spare bedroom in Julian’s apartment. Not long after that, they are regularly having sex, while denying that they are boyfriend and girlfriend.

Ava thinks a lot about language, particularly since she is now teaching it. She had known that other languages have a subjunctive mood, but it it comes as something of a revelation to her that it exists in English too:

English has a subjunctive. I learned that fact the morning I taught it …

I didn’t know because the English subjunctive required phrasing I would never use. Apparently, you didn’t say: “What if I was attracted to her.” You said: “What if I were.” (p. 106)

But in fact she has been using the subjunctive, apparently without noticing: “I wished Julian were married” (p. 26); “What if I were your age?” (p. 30). Perhaps she’s comfortable with it when she’s referring to a male, but not to a female? Has she been brought up to believe that statements about women must be indicative or imperative, while only those about men may be conditional, wishful or hypothetical?

Regularly throughout the novel, Ava analyses what she and others say. When Julian’s employer sends him back to London for several months, Ava, who has remained in the apartment in his absence, meets and falls in love with Edith Zhang, a woman her own age, a Cambridge graduate — she tells Julian she’s a “tab” (p. 205) — now working as a junior lawyer.

The evening before I went to meet Mrs Zhang, I’d voiced my concern that I only used Edith’s English name and asked if I was ignoring a plank of her personhood. She laughed and said her family used “Edith” more often than “Mei Ling” and that she identified more strongly with the former. She didn’t say I was being condescending. She didn’t need to. I wished I had her talent for making herself understood. (p. 243)

These passages in which Ada scrutinizes her own and others’ speech are a large part of what give the novel its unique flavour, but they can also be its most irritating feature. The differences between Irish and English usage of the prepositon “after” have been rehashed ad nauseam. Ava doesn’t avoid the cliché but she adds some nuances that were new to me:

… when you were “after” doing something, it meant you’d just done it but didn’t expect the hearer to know. “I’ve just fallen in love”: we thought it might happen and it has. “I’m after falling in love”: look, I didn’t think there was a heart in this piece-of-shit chest compartment, either, but here we are. “Only after” was “just after” plus exasperation: mud on a carpet you’re only after hoovering, losing someone you’re only after finding. (p. 181)

Ava went straight from Dublin to Hong Kong without ever having spent any time in Britain, not even in London. Julian is incredulous that she has “never been” to London (p. 4). I suspected at first that Ava’s unfamiliarity with England leads her to overestimate the difficulty that English people supposedly have in comprehending their own language as we speak it in Ireland. English people have been interacting with Irish people for decades at least. They may find our peculiar locutions amusing or quaint, but that doesn’t mean they need subtitles. Then I noticed that Oisín, a wealthy friend of Julian’s friends and an Irishman, is not pulled up for asking “Will we” do some cocaine, rather than “Shall we” (p. 57). So perhaps Julian’s circle are more likely to quibble at or tease a woman than a man (particularly an expensively educated one) for her Irishisms.

If Ava is fascinated by language both as a medium of communication and as a remarkably complex human artefact, that is perhaps even more true of the author who created her. Dolan’s second novel, The Happy Couple (2023) is the story of an engagement between Celine and Luke, who are described respectively on facing pages as “violently allergic to two things: logistics, communications” (p. 8) and “a communications strategist at a multinational tech firm that had bought up Dublin’s docklands for its headquarters” (p. 9). Celine’s aversion to communications and Luke’s strategization of the field may be at the heart of the conflict between them. Luke’s habitual refrain that he’s “not good at relationships” is glossed by Celine when she explains to Archie, who had been Luke’s sort-of-boyfriend in college:

“He wanted you to contradict him,” Celine said. “And you can’t do it by scolding. So that would be why he shut you down. If you’d said ‘Luke, I want us to be together, and if we can’t we need to break it off completely or I’ll be tortured with false hope’ — I think that’s what he was after. He needs the ultimatum.” (The Happy Couple, p. 250)

Is something similar going on with Julian in the first novel, who maintains that the pattern of interactions between him and Ava is not “a relationship”, yet effectively subsidizes her existence and, when his bank transfers him to Frankfurt, asks her to come with him?

As well as the novels, I’ve been reading Dolan’s Substack for a few months now. Indeed, it was probably her Substack posts that sent me back to Exciting Times and made me consider writing about it after all. Many of her posts are about language. She already spoke French and Spanish and learned German, Italian and some Swedish more or less from scratch, and she understands some Slovakian. Recently, she has gone back to Irish which, like most of us who had our primary and secondary education in Ireland, she studied for fourteen years at school.

While I find her views about Irish teaching and learning interestingly provocative, I don’t share her enthusiasm for the language, still less her apparent disdain for the one in which she writes her fiction, which she describes in the post I linked to above as “this imperialist shitshow of a language”. Some of her thoughts on learning Irish, and on how the teaching of the language could be improved, sent me back to a post of my own from nearly eight years ago. It’s the first thing I posted on Medium, and my first substantial blog post: The Language of Ireland. I was surprised, and a little bit perturbed, at how little my views on the subject have changed in the meantime.

I had thought I might say something about Naoise Dolan’s first name, simply because “Naoise” happens to be my own middle name. When I was growing up the name was quite unusual, in part because Catholic priests tended to insist on saints’ names for “christening” (as the local parish priest attempted to do with my mother). The mythical Naoise was the lover of Deirdre of the Sorrows, something I didn’t know until I was well into my 40s, when a US graduate student (presumably of Yeats) enlightened me as to the origin of one of my own names.

Editions: Exciting Times, Weidenfeld & Nicolson paperback, 2021;
The Happy Couple, Ecco/HarperCollins hardback, 2023 (US edition)