Originally published in print November 2020.
When Sally Rooney’s debut was released, she was “the Salinger for the Snapchat generation”. When Naoise Dolan’s first book was published, The Irish Times promised Exciting Times would “fill the Sally Rooney-shaped hole in your heart”. Both pitches feel thin and cheap. Neither of them are signifiers of talented writers, but of commercially successful writers. They relied on the mechanical wheels of the literary marketplace to turn on their own and carry both authors to the top of the bestsellers list. Rooney and Dolan share one more similarity: they are communists, as are their protagonists.
When the reviews came in for Rooney’s debut, there was a slight difference in how it was celebrated at home and abroad. International reviewers noted the awareness Rooney had of how Irish people spoke, but journalists from home celebrated Rooney’s transcription of what they spoke about. Speaking on writing the zeitgeist, Colm Tóibín said: “no matter what you do – what’s going on in the background of society has to make its way into the novel; even if you try to keep it out it’ll come in in some way or other, doesn’t mean you have to foreground this, but you have to know it”. In Rooney’s and Dolan’s novels, it is this weirdness of capitalism that hangs over the narrative. They write about a country where the average three-bedroom semi-detached home in the capital city is €440k, but the average Dubliner’s annual salary is €40k — before tax. The effects of the free market are both directly and indirectly seen here, there is a widening gap between what you should want, and what you do want; the classic adultery plot of Conversations with Friends, and Dolan’s perfect love triangle.
When Francis, Rooney’s narrator, and her ex-to-best girlfriend, Bobbi, meet moneyed-Melissa, their self-introductions are simple and painful: Bobbi is gay and Francis is a communist (the suggestion is there that Bobbi would also be a communist, if only she didn’t come from so much money.) Francis’ political views are complicated by the fact that she relies on the fruits of a free-market Dublin which places value on personal ownership. Francis can live unemployed, alone and rent-free in the Capital by living in a family-owned apartment in the Liberties with parents well-off enough to fund her college fees, social life, and French holidays abroad. The only time she struggles financially is because she is too proud to ask for money, not because there is none there for her. So her claims to “destroy capitalism” are equal parts embarrassing and hollow; they are contradictory and self-effacing. Yet she can claim moral purity because she effectively owns nothing. She shouldn’t want the life she has, but she does; she definitely shouldn’t pine for Melissa’s husband, but of course, she does. It is a moral question: can a communist enjoy the smell of petrol?
There is a special irony lurking in the background of all of this, the Celtic Tiger, and its litter of Celtic Cubs. Francis may not be used to owning nice things herself, but she knows what those nice things are. She says so clearly herself: “I was always thinking about rich people then”. The dramatic excess and sudden restriction of the early 2000s is familiar to the Cubs that grew up in the boom and matured in the bust. Their thought patterns begin to mirror movements of the economic model, and the principles of the time influence their understanding of the world. Competitive morals bleed into interpersonal relations, easily imagining them as transactional, seeing people as resources, and affecting psychologies. This intellectual dynamic is the locomotive of the novel, and Rooney delicately steers it for maximum dramatic effect.
Editor’s note: Caution, this essay will now discuss eating disorders and self-harm; please read with care
In one conversation, Francis suggests that Nick’s depression is a “humane response to the conditions of late capitalism”; it is one of the most obvious references to the novel’s impulse to point to global concerns affecting personal behaviours. A similar rationale is continued with Francis’ relationship with food. At a critical moment of disconnection in an important relationship to her, she describes her body as feeling “used up and worthless to me. I didn’t want to put food or medicine into it anymore.” As Francis’ hold on her surrounding networks slacks, her relationship with her body similarly distorts. The dissolved boundaries between abstract and literal are dramatised — eroticised, even. By the detachment from her surroundings — within which her body is included — “the world was like a crumpled ball of newspaper to me, something to kick around.” Her unconscious reliance on the capitalist framework was untenable, unsustainable, so she jettisons her personal wants and identity to allow her communist beliefs to operate without conflict. Is there a correct way to give love and receive it? If there is no way to safely, humanely consume, then a clear, fail-safe answer is not to consume at all. This is a severe snatching back, the personal “bust” after the boom. As a communist, there is a certain comfort from rejecting everything associated with consumerism, though put to a personal level, it reads as disturbing and unhealthy. Rooney writes this tense cycle of push-and-pull — this boom-and-bust — with incredible sensitivity.
In Exciting Times, Dolan is much more thorough in her investigation into capitalist living. Rooney’s characters deal with the effects of capitalism in a passive, non-responsive way. Dolan’s Ava is more cynical and clever. Dolan is authorial and autonomous as a novelist, taking Ava out of Dublin, out of the West entirely and placing her in Hong Kong. The economics of the Dublin market make Ireland an exciting place to leave. The slipping out of free-market Dublin to Communist-led Hong Kong is fantastically hollow. At the end of the 20th century, not unlike Ireland, Hong Kong adopted capitalist economic policies, a move that opened the state up to neoliberalism. This was a major influence in the metropolisation of Hong Kong. Quickly, there was a rise in bankers, real estate agents, and a suffocating middle class.
Like Rooney’s Frances, Ava views the world through the prism of economics. Time is money in Dolan’s novel, not ironically, but practically. Characters are miserly with their time — counting it, weighing its worth. The life she leads in Dublin could be counted in euros, the hours of her “dead life” spent working was currencied by a wage and transferred into her hypothetical “abortion fund”, the savings kept to make it “harder for anyone to force me to do anything.” This sounds like a line from Frances: “as a feminist, I have the right not to love anyone.” I’m not sure to what political end these ideas lean into; there is a simultaneous lamentation of individualism, but a push away from collectivism too. Both novels deal with a strong personality straining to collapse under and into the networks of society, but how to do that ethically in a system that can flip on a dime, for a dime. The plot of Exciting Times revolves around a love triangle between Ava, and Edith and Julian. This healthy competition between two parties, Edith and Julian, operating for the affection of a single consumer, Ava, is what propels the narrative, which is decorated with kinks, twists and severances, along. Ava struggles with the ethics of human interaction: how can you receive love without exploiting your lover? If, on a global level, selfishness causes so much pain and suffering, how can it be reconciled on a personal level? The novel lives to ask these questions, and comes to a beautiful end.
The messaging in both novels agree in a strikingly similar fashion: capitalist systems fail us. The crush comes when both protagonists buy into these systems when they distance themselves from pure social intentions. But remission comes from the healing of community and interpersonal solidarity. I think of Melissa, who is pained more than anyone in either of the novels, “Are you making my husband better, Frances? What gives you the right to do that?” It is confirmed in the final scenes of each text, (no spoilers) when Frances answers the phone and Ava runs up the steps. The connectivity and the cost-neutral indulgence in interaction and love is the rejection of commodification. Not able to be qualified, labelled, packaged, sold.
