Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?

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.