These self-conscious times have furnished us with a new fallacy. Call it the reflexivity trap. This is the implicit, and sometimes explicit, idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance. The problem with such signalling is that it rarely resolves the anxieties that seem to prompt it. Mocking your emotions, or expressing doubt or shame about them, doesn’t negate those emotions; castigating yourself for hypocrisy, cowardice, or racism won’t necessarily make you less hypocritical, cowardly, or racist. As the cracks in our systems become increasingly visible, the reflexivity trap casts self-awareness as a finish line, not a starting point. To the extent that this discourages further action, oblivion might be preferable.
There are plenty of reasons to think about the trap and its offshoots, which include performative allyship and self-protective irony. I’ll confine myself to books: reflexivity traps are springing all across literature. Aesthetic and commercial incentives drive authors toward the “authentic,” and a newly legible form of authenticity, under (forgive me) late capitalism, is a kind of pained complicity. The most trustworthy speakers strike us as perceptive but self-critical. Often, they are darkly funny. Desperate to undercut themselves before the reader can, they don’t prescribe or argue or even exercise much agency but, rather, turn inward, holding up a disenchanted mirror to what they think and feel. The result, viewed uncharitably, is a crop of protagonists who are to be congratulated for spending enough time contemplating themselves that they can correctly diagnose their own flaws.
All of which is a wildly grumpy introduction to some likable books, including “Exciting Times,” a new novel by the twenty-eight-year-old Irish author Naoise Dolan. Dolan’s plot follows Ava, a twenty-two-year-old Dubliner who lives in Hong Kong and teaches English to local children. She meets her “banker friend Julian,” a self-assured and emotionally distant Brit, in his late twenties, at a bar. (“Julian had gone to Eton and was an only child. These were the two least surprising facts anyone had ever told me about themselves.”) After a few weeks of casual sex, Ava moves from her shoebox apartment into Julian’s flat, where she begins to ironically cosplay wifedom: tidying up, ironing clothes, giving blow jobs. Despite her Marxist politics, “I enjoyed his money and he enjoyed how easily impressed I was by it,” Ava admits.
Dolan has a wonderfully intuitive and fluid handle on Ava, a young person who equates adulthood with moral imperfection and who finds herself disgusted and beguiled by both. Ava wants someone to tell her what to want, but she’ll settle for wanting nothing. She and Julian evince the self-inflicted unhappiness of people whose loneliness only heightens their fear of intimacy. When they’re not tending to the exhausting project of their own nonchalance, they drink wine and trade tentative compliments. (“I told him he was attractive. I said it exactly like that—‘I find you attractive’—to avoid seeming earnest. ‘You’re quite attractive, too,’ he said.”) The pair’s flattened affect has the paradoxical effect of implying depth, and their cynicism suggests a vulnerability that needs protecting. When Ava catches herself daydreaming, she starts “correctively listing things I disliked about myself . . . flat feet, doughy hands, clumsiness, moral cowardice.”
The novel takes a turn when Julian transfers temporarily to London, and Ava, while continuing to live in his apartment, starts seeing Mei Ling (Edith) Zhang, a lawyer who was born in Hong Kong and educated abroad. To her terror, Ava begins to fall in love with Edith. The women are the same age; they bond over Instagram and the wrongs of the British Empire. Dolan sometimes flicks at the limits of Ava’s identification with Edith—“You’re not noticing because you’re white,” Edith snaps, when Ava asks why it matters that a waiter addressed her in Cantonese—but, over all, the story requires the two of them to be relatively similar. When Julian returns, Ava feels torn between the chilly safety that he represents and the perilous intimacy that Edith offers.
“Exciting Times” is an examination of sex, queerness, self-sabotage, power, and privilege. Its milieu is young and left-leaning, and its tone is dry, sharp, and cerebral. Unavoidably, Dolan, a first-time novelist, has drawn comparisons to Sally Rooney, comparisons that her publisher has encouraged: two out of the book’s five blurbs name-check Rooney, and Dolan’s bio states that “ ‘Exciting Times’ is her first novel, an excerpt from which was published in [the literary journal] ‘The Stinging Fly’ by Sally Rooney.” Rooney, if you are just visiting Earth, is an Irish writer, now twenty-nine, whose name has become synonymous with disaffected millennial longing. Her two novels, “Normal People” and “Conversations with Friends,” follow brainy, alienated young people as they seek intimacy and—like Jane Austen’s heroines, but less subtly—refract their obsessions with interpersonal power through a sociopolitical lens.
Please! Believe me when I say that I did not want to make this review all about Rooney. But imitation is part of “Exciting Times” ’s virtuosity. Deadpan prose punctuated by similes? Check. (“It was humid. Briefcase-bearers clopped out of turnstiles like breeding jennets.”) Exquisitely precise observations about social dynamics? Check. (“At the restaurant he put his phone facedown on the table, so I did the same, as if for me, too, this represented a professional sacrifice.”) Repurposed financial language? Cheque. (“Keeping up with both [Julian and Edith] took work, but their similarities lent the enterprise a certain economy of scale.”) Even the specifics align: both Dolan and Rooney give us mean-girl rivals, Marxist erotica, climactic medical scares, and e-mails and texts, sent and unsent, that propel the plot forward.
Rooney’s weaknesses are inscribed here, too. Like Frances and Marianne, the main characters in “Conversations with Friends” and “Normal People,” Ava falls into baroque spirals of self-hatred that the plot does not wholly account for. Dolan, like Rooney, conjures her protagonists in a few selective strokes—an effect that bewitches, at first, but the characters don’t linger afterward, and they seem mostly defined by the impression they make on others. Most important, Dolan follows Rooney into the jaws of the reflexivity trap. This is a frequent gripe with Rooney: that it’s hard to tell exactly how far her self-awareness goes. In a review of “Normal People,” for New York, Cody Delistraty noted the awkward dissonance between the characters’ politics (“May the revolution be swift and brutal”) and their behavior (chatting in a coffee shop while activists protest the household tax). But Delistraty didn’t just take aim at Rooney’s characters; he claimed that politics, for Rooney herself, “is ultimately more setting than subject, more a way of quickly defining characters and creating tensions rather than necessarily motivating them.”
In other words, Rooney, like her characters, seems content to perform awareness of inequality, even to exploit it as a device, but not to engage with it as a profound and messy reality. (“Normal People,” for example, makes Marianne’s love interest, Connell, the son of the woman who cleans Marianne’s house; the woman is meant to represent the dignity of the working class, but she has little life of her own.) To better earn her lefty laurels, the argument runs, Rooney could dramatize economic suffering, rather than relegating it to the margins of the plot. More damning still, Rooney’s women suffer in modes that are precisely palatable—even glamorous—to the market. They invite men to hurt them; they have eating disorders; they despise themselves and try endlessly, futilely, to be “good.” Such characters suggest less a challenge to capitalism than a capitalist wet dream.
Dolan’s engagement with politics feels at least as superficial. Not only does Ava admit to not being able to name a single candidate in Hong Kong’s upcoming election, but the novel itself would rather gawk at lavish parties and designer handbags than spend any time among the lower or middle classes. (The book’s jacket copy also compares it, hilariously, to “Crazy Rich Asians.”) Dolan offers little about the city’s history or people, and not much physical evocation beyond the escalators ribboning up and down the hill, connecting the business district to the rich residential neighborhoods. When Edith muses that she sees the merits of Marxism but that she also appreciates having nice things, Ava texts her: “Marxism means thinking everyone should have nice things.” Then the women go shopping together.
Hypocrisy is rich territory for fiction, and the fact that Dolan writes about young people who contradict themselves is not, in itself, a problem. One could even argue that Dolan’s own socialist leanings—her grasp of how grinding and impossible the system can be—inform her depiction of characters with untenable ideological commitments. But those commitments, and others, never feel real on the page; they feel like credentials, and if a character acts against them he or she is dutifully redeemed by self-awareness. “I was a horrible person,” Ava laments at one point. “I was living in one person’s flat, fucking someone else without telling them. . . .” Yet, because Ava knows what she’s doing and feels conflicted about it, Dolan still presents her as superior to her peers, who are vapid and doltish. After concluding that it would be “ungrateful” to refuse “a mythologically beautiful girlfriend and a nice apartment to share with her,” Ava winds up keeping both the girlfriend and the luxury, having earned them, apparently, through the moral work of feeling bad. As Edith tells Ava: “You want to feel special—which is fair, who doesn’t—but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.” It is a neat and brutal insight, which Ava promptly forgets about. The reflexivity trap twangs.
Rooney and Dolan, who study the intersection of innocence, experience, and self-delusion, are working in the Bildungsroman tradition, which is where the reflexivity trap most often finds its prey. This makes some sense. The Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, and its cousin the Künstlerroman, or becoming-an-artist story, are journeys of the self. Historically, these journeys have involved growth (Candide tempers his optimism, Emma her entitlement) and the painful reconciliation of action and belief. But today’s practitioners—Rooney and Dolan, and also Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Kate Zambreno, among others—halt the journey midway through, leaving their characters tuned to problems but unable to solve them. The self-scrutiny and self-recrimination remain; the maturity is optional.
At worst, the books can feel stunted themselves, unsophisticated and void of stakes. The critic Becca Rothfeld has usefully compared Rooney’s novels, for instance, to “Twilight” and “Fifty Shades of Grey,” books that waft seemingly ordinary women into fairy-tale lives. “If you are a writer in a Rooney novel,” Rothfeld observes, “you are sure to be discovered without going to any great lengths to promote yourself. . . . And if you are a woman in a Rooney novel, you will only ever become disheveled in a glamorous way.” One can fairly connect Rooney (and Dolan) to the young-adult (Y.A.) genre, whose business is less often growth than the slow-motion coronation of a reader surrogate. Even the yearnings that shape how these books measure success are adolescent. Characters say that they care about love or justice; what they really seem to care about is external validation.
In fact, “Exciting Times” suggests that Julian and Ava get along precisely because each can provide the other with that most valuable social resource. Julian relishes being the type of man who dates intelligent, aloof women—“He enjoyed my sharpness primarily because it was an impressive thing to have on retainer”—and Ava is pleased when Julian acknowledges “both my outer sparkle and the interior layer only clever people saw.” Ava delivers these comments ironically: we’re meant to wince at her and Julian’s symbiotic narcissism; furthermore, we might expect Edith to give us some respite from all the sizing up. But Dolan also insists, confusingly, on Edith’s social desirability: her high-powered résumé, her covetable clothes, her many friends. Beyond these sterile indications of worthiness—and the pat suggestion that Edith understands Ava better than anyone else does—the love of Ava’s life remains a cipher.
It’s another instance of “Exciting Times” capitulating to the very values that it seems to want to critique. If Dolan considers the ego affirmation that powers Ava and Julian’s relationship to be hollow, even toxic, then why spend so much time evoking characters who long to befriend, sleep with, or—in the case of a jealous rival—usurp her protagonist? Why must a gratuitous child materialize, in the book’s final pages, to assure Ava that she, Ava, is prettier than the child’s new English teacher? Ava, “scathing” and “enigmatic,” suggests an awkward valedictorian’s fantasy self: tossing off brilliant aperçus, endearingly unaware of her own specialness. Dolan even lifts the narrator’s so-called flaws from the Y.A. playbook—“pale,” “shy” (yet “vivacious”), no appetite, painfully insecure. One thinks of the braggart’s joke: “and I’m humble, too!”
This sort of fiction plucks a character from obscurity and showers her in positive reinforcement. The role of the trap, which severs the interior world from exterior events, is to insist that an alluring, intelligent, and popular person remains, despite everything, deeply self-loathing. The reader, meanwhile, begins to wonder whether self-inflicted misery is a sufficient counterweight, narratively, to stupid amounts of adoration. It is possible to suspend disbelief, of course, or to experience the contrast between how the world views a protagonist and how that protagonist views herself as poignant. But this gets harder when the authors appear to be bothering with the misery only insofar as it facilitates the adoration. Ava’s self-loathing, like Marianne’s, isn’t sourceless, exactly. It just has an external source: the novel’s need for drama and balance. The insecurity is instrumental, a servant to the wish-fulfillment. It helps the fantasy go down.
Revealingly, both Rooney and Dolan propose a hazy link between characters’ self-hatred and their class. Ava, whose family in Ireland is barely making ends meet, craves the privileges that Julian and Edith take for granted. Frances, a poet with cash-flow problems, insinuates herself into the lives of Melissa and Nick, a well-off couple. (A hasty plot twist rescues Frances before she suffers real deprivation.) Marianne’s wealth drives a wedge between her and Connell, whose financial hardship represents the one bad card that fate has dealt him—he is brilliant, a star athlete, handsome, sensitive, kind. I suspect that if some readers distrust the sincerity of Rooney’s politics, it’s for the same reason that I bridle at Ava’s self-loathing. Perhaps these readers sense that the characters’ economic disadvantages, like their psychological struggles, don’t serve a broader argument but, rather, clatter onto a kind of competitive scoreboard. Inequality reduces to a lightly sketched handicap for people who are already perfect according to all the metrics that it is fashionable to care about.
The first time I reviewed a Sally Rooney book, in 2017, I struggled to articulate my sense that the characters were trapped in a flawed system and searching for meaning within it. It was obvious that “Conversations with Friends” was a novel organized from the top down, in accordance with sweeping principles. The characters felt over-determined and strangely passive; they did things not just because the system told them to but because the novel needed them to. Reading “Exciting Times,” I get a similar impression. As entertaining as Dolan can be, the world of the book feels rigged, as if its purpose were to produce an outcome that maximally flatters its protagonists. It promulgates a dream in which “normal people” ride their gifts to the top, even as the gifts confirm that these people were never normal to begin with. What’s more, this structure takes ostensibly good things—namely, self-awareness—and empties them of meaning. It co-opts the good things to help the winners win.
There’s a glib joke to be made about how this approach, far from interrogating capitalism, actually mirrors it. But I’m reminded more of Calvinism, its vision of the sainted and the damned, and of the scrabbling for signifiers that mark one out as elect. What does it mean to write a coming-of-age novel when a character’s life is predestined? These books, so reluctant to engage with change, agency, and suffering, turn instead to awareness, which they frame as atonement. Meanwhile, the actual substance of living—a person’s history, hopes, and contradictions—is rendered as fixed, external, and inert. The result isn’t so much a political offense as an artistic one, and Dolan captures the limits of such work with her wryly ambivalent title. When all of life’s a game, everything is “exciting” and nothing is.
