It is not voice that makes Roddy Doyle’s novels run, though ever since his first — The Commitments, a comic 1987 tale of a gang of poor Dublin kids trying to form an American-style soul band — the Irish novelist has garnered praise for giving realistic modern voice to the poverty-stricken characters of urban Ireland. Neither is it narrative — Doyle’s high-speed, almost drunken lurch through storytelling — though his 1993 Booker Prize-winner, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, was celebrated for its ten-year-old boy’s narration of the break-up of his parents’ marriage.
What really makes a Roddy Doyle novel run is bounce, the mad joy and insane hope with which his working-class characters face a joyless world their creator has stacked hopelessly against them. And when the bounce runs down — as it has in his new book, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (Viking, 226 pages, $ 22.95) — what remains is only voice and narrative, which prove ever less compelling as his horrifying account of an abused and alcoholic Irish housewife gradually tires out its readers.
Curiously, however, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is the only Doyle novel in which a character’s action leads to any success, the only one that could end with its heroine declaring, “I’d done something good.” Born in 1958, Doyle was teaching grammar school after his graduation from University College, Dublin, when he finished The Commitments. Unable to interest a publisher, he borrowed 5,000 pounds and published the novel himself under the imprint of “King Farouk” (Dublin rhyming slang for “book”). The novel eventually earned him over 70,000 pounds and laid the foundation of the Rabbitte family in the fictional Dublin ghetto of Barrytown on which he built his next two works: The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991).
Nothing much ever comes to good in Barrytown. With the help of a balding, fifty-year-old American trumpeter who once jammed with the soul-crooner Joe Tex, Jimmy Rabbitte manages to persuade his pale friends to form the band they fondly imagine will change themselves and Ireland forever. “Say it once, say it loud,” he whoops in an off-key James Brown soul-shout, “I’m black an” I’m proud.” But after some small successes, the Commitments collapse in acrimonious wrangling and the novel ends with Jimmy’s return to his record collection and his dreams.
In The Snapper, Jimmy’s twenty-year-old unmarried sister Sharon is pregnant. But rather than admit that the father is a middle-aged neighbor, she vainly tries to convince everyone of her one-night stand with a dreamy Spanish sailor off the docks. In The Van, Jimmy’s father and his friend Bimbo buy a decrepit food wagon and prowl the streets of Dublin during the 1990 World Cup, poisoning hungry soccer fans with undercooked fish-and-chips and trying to dodge the health inspectors. The Van too ends with a return to the way things were and always have been, as the friendship between Jimmy, Sr. and Bimbo breaks under the strain of the long hours working together.
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a darker novel with an even darker ending, in which Doyle gives up straightforward narrative and tries to follow the odd jumps and segues in the thoughts and experiences of a city boy growing up in the 1960s while his family falls apart. But even Paddy Clarke derives its success from the energy with which its young narrator moves through his blasted world.
Doyle’s impoverished urban Ireland is no longer the history-haunted, mostly rural Emerald Isle that W.B. Yeats, John Synge, Sean O’Casey, Flann O’Brien, and even James Joyce still believed in. And yet, Doyle still retains some old- time Irish in him, for his novels — especially in their early stages, while hope and energy still run high — bounce along on exuberance and expectation. Doyle’s angry young men have only to hoist a few down at the pub, and the world again seems amenable to grand and hilarious plans. The drunken narrative matches its characters drink for drink — perpetually balanced between the maudlin and the truculent, that tipsy point where nearly everything seems funny.
It is a rule of fiction, however, that heroes and victims should never tell their own stories if they know themselves to be either heroes or victims. Like all successful presentations of a child’s world in adult fiction — like Dickens’s David Copperfield, Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, even Kosinski’s The Painted Bird — Doyle’s Paddy Clarke works because its narrating boy understands neither his own heroism nor the extent to which he is a victim. But Doyle stumbles in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, allowing his victim-heroine Paula Spencer to tell her own story of alcoholism and wife abuse with full self-pitying consciousness.
A pretty working-class girl in a world in which all teenage girls are either “tight” or “sluts,” Paula falls for a sexy boy named Charlo the first time she sees him. There are some undeveloped suggestions in the novel that under better social conditions Charlo might have made something of himself, but after a blissful honeymoon, the marriage turns sour. When Paula, queasy with the morning-sickness of her first pregnancy, snaps at her husband, he knocks her to the floor.
The remaining years of her marriage pass in an alcoholic haze, the occasional good times buried in the endless catalogue of abuse: burns and rapes and kicks, beating after beating. But, catching her husband eyeing their eldest daughter one day, Paula at last awakens from her haze and inertia, and smashes Charlo with a frying pan — blow after blow, driving him bloody and dazed from the house. A year later, when Charlo is gunned down by the police in a bungled bank robbery, Paula sits down to sift it all out of her damaged memories.
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors contains some precise observations. The look Paula sees in Charlo’s face as he leers at their daughter is not lust, but hatred; her own mother’s embarrassment at Paula’s early menarche expresses itself as anger; her sober memory of her drunken episodes remains uncertain and drunken.
But the overall effect is far from precise, as Doyle’s attempt to pack in every known symptom of a battered wife makes Paula into little more than a generic victim with none of the humor and grit that make his bleak world bearable and believable. And the generic quality of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors has the unintended effect of suggesting a generic quality in Doyle’s earlier work. By giving an alcoholic, abused woman the same Dublin voice he gave a teenage rok-and-roller, an unwed mother, and an old man in his Barrytown trilogy, and the same pattern of memory he gave a ten-year-old boy in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Doyle demonstrates not a capacious vision but a profound limit to his imagination.
In 1994, the BBC produced Doyle’s four-part television play, The Family, which is said to have had much the same effect in Ireland that Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 television film Scenes from a Marriage had in Sweden, and which may have been a decisive factor in the recent Irish vote that legalized divorce. Away from Ireland’s envenomed social politics, however, the effort didn’t travel well, and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors seems to suffer equally from its author’s new-found desire to instruct his readers. What’s sad is not just that Doyle has begun to use his art as a kind of over-easy social propaganda. (Who, after all, is in favor of wife-beating?) What’s sad is rather that — in order to forge in the smithy of his bestsellers the uncreated social conscience of his race — Doyle finds it necessary to strip his characters of the bounce that used to make his novels run.
EDITOR-NOTE:
With this issue, Contributing Editor J. Bottum assumes the duties of fiction critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
By J. Bottum
