I hesitated a bit before reading this—I wasn’t sure if it would be Sally Rooney Splenda. But while their writing does overlap in thematic and stylistic ways, Dolan’s book is interesting in its own right. I particularly appreciated her observations on language as a site of class and racial violence.
I’ll try to find the reference, but I remember a film writer saying that Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence was more violent than his gangster movies, especially because the violence was cloaked in genteel manners. Exciting Times reminded me of this in spots, even as it was engaging with that violence explicitly.