I thought this was so dumb and funny, the main character in this situation is obviously a neurotic weirdo, and the other woman just mispronounced a word in a language she didn't know, while still attempting it in the language, at least. The wealthier woman orders thé au citron but mispronounces it, and the main character has this internal dialogue because she wants to belittle the woman, so she changes her order to also order the lemon tea, but says it in english on purpose, then she repeats herself in french with the proper pronunciation. I was flipping through and I read this passage where the main character is meeting up with this wealthier woman she knows at a french tea room. Soon she has Julian’s credit card and the run of his often-empty apartment, politically outraged but privately titillated by her promotion to the position of ‘actual kept woman’.I was at my friend's place and she had that Naoise Dolan book exciting times that was everywhere a few years ago or whenever it came out. ‘I wasn’t good at most things but I was good at men,’ Ava reassures the reader. He is part of the island’s rather spiritless Oxbridge expat elite, which has floated over from Oxford’s dreaming spires into Hong Kong’s spires of glass and greed without touching ground in between. Julian is a self-possessed and stern banker who, having been educated at Eton and Balliol, is also an emotionally damaged commitment-phobe and a pretentious amoralist. Morally compromised by her new-found status as capitalist lackey and menaced by the culturally imperialist overtones of her work, Ava only diversifies her portfolio of troubles when she falls into a liaison with Julian. Twenty-two and spiritually adrift, Ava arrives in Hong Kong to teach English to the children of wealthy natives.

Short story long, Exciting Times plays limited variations on familiar Rooney tunes.

The debut novel of Naoise Dolan, currently the next Sally Rooney, even comes with an endorsement from the previous Sally Rooney, who published an excerpt from Exciting Times as a short story in The Stinging Fly magazine, of which she was the editor in 2018. A well-known hypothesis states that if a million young novelists at a million typewriters were to write a million first novels about the disaffected female millennial experience, they would each in turn be proclaimed ‘the next Sally Rooney’.

Naoise dolan sally rooney