It was Reading Matters that took me to this book. Kim noted it has been compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People and l agree with Kim that there is a superficial similarity. The characters are young adults trying to decide what their lives will be and that description fits countless books. In this case Ava, a young Irish woman narrates the story of her time in Hong Kong where she moved to escape the sadness she felt in Dublin. She has a low-paying job teaching English to children. Ava meets Julian, an English banker who soon lets her know he read English at Oxford and tries to determine whether her Dublin accent is posh (it’s not). It suits them both to spend time together: “I enjoyed his money and he enjoyed how easily impressed by it I was.”
Generally I quickly tire of clever, cynical writing, but I kept reading this one. Another example of the cleverness is Ava’s description of herself as a teacher, “Because I lacked warmth, I was mainly assigned to grammar classes where your children not liking you was a positive performance indicator.”
Julian was happy to have Ava stay in his apartment while he was away for work for weeks and sometimes months at a time. While they occasionally had sex, Ava slept in the spare room and they were together only as a convenience. It was less appealing when Ava speaks of using Julian’s money to buy presents for others and when she described the menial tasks she did for him.
I found that I began to be interested about one-third of the way in when Ava fell in love with Edith, a Hong Kong native who was also a banker. She lost some of her cynical, distant tone, but was not inclined to give up the creature comforts that Julian provided. Before he returned home, Ava accidentally sent Julian an email that revealed how she really felt. She was anxious for days until he finally responded without showing much emotion. When he arrived home, the three of them spent time together occasionally. She broke off with Edith.
SPOILER ALERT!
When Julian’s bank transfers him to Frankfort, he first tells Ava he is going in three weeks and then asks her to go with him. She agrees and prepares to follow him a day or two after he left. The end is ambiguous: perhaps she left to follow Julian, perhaps she stayed to be with Edith, perhaps the two women left together to join Julian. While that ending was not clear, the ambiguity does fit the story as a whole.
While the writing was clever enough to keep me reading, I never had the feeling of this being about real people. Ava’s descriptions of herself and others were too contrived.
Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times, Ecco (HarperCollins), 2020, 242 pages. I listened to the audiobook. Available in the public library.