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New Hibernia Review 6.1 (2002) 148-149



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Book Review

Reading Roddy Doyle


Reading Roddy Doyle, by Caramine White, pp. 200. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. $39.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).

Caramine White—aware that this volume stands as the first monograph on the Dublin novelist Roddy Doyle—clearly intends for her book to be as complete and useful a resource as possible, and, for the most part, she succeeds. Best known in the United States for The Commitments and that novel's filmic incarnation, Doyle has published six novels, five of which garner a chapter each in White's study. As the sixth, A Star Called Henry, appeared as White's book neared completion, she wisely includes only a brief synoptic discussion of the novel in an appendix.

Doyle's first three novels, The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van, known as the Barrytown Trilogy for their setting—modeled after Doyle's native Dublin suburb Kilbarrack—center on the working-class Rabbitte family. While discussing the trilogy's shared traits, like Doyle's reliance on comedy and his rendering of colorful, profanity-laden Dublin speech, White calls particular attention to the novels' distinguishing elements, such as the centrality of soul music to The Commitments or social and familial attitudes toward unwed pregnancy as depicted in The Snapper. White also judiciously uses the three film adaptations of the Barrytown novels to amplify and illustrate her remarks on the texts.

Echoing both the changing tenor of Doyle's novels and her own vivid metaphor that with The Van, White remarks that in this novel "Doyle sheds his authorial baby fat and begins to write fiction with a harder edge," White's discussion of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and of The Woman Who Walked into Doors deepens. In these first-person narratives of, respectively, a young boy's perception of divorce and a battered woman's reevaluation of her violent marriage in light of her ex-husband's death, "the world, it seems, is getting more serious for Doyle." White's treatment of these latter books relies less on synopsis and more on interpretation; her examination of Paddy Clarke, an especially effective chapter, expands to include narratology, Irish divorce laws, and Huck Finn. Tracing the development of Paula Spencer, the title character and walker-into-doors, White observes, "One might say that Paula is an extraordinary set of characters—indeed, one can discern at least four Paulas." She follows this perceptive remark with a discussion of Paula's evolving consciousness, both in comparison to the character Paddy Clarke and in light of Irish societal norms.

White's work reflects a number of tensions— the most prominent of which is the critics' divided verdict on Doyle's literary merit. Despite his Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in 1993, Doyle eschews literary elitism, claiming his [End Page 148] right to read both Salman Rushdie and Elmore Leonard: "I've never liked the division between the high and the low, the literary and the popular." Doyle also takes time to excoriate the "huge [academic] industry around selected writers," like James Joyce, "to the neglect of other writers."

In fact, the specter of Joycean influence haunts a large part of book—but the specter seems to be introduced on White's part, not Doyle's. The novelist's assertion "I didn't like Stephen, particularly the older Stephen" notwithstanding, White is intent on finding analogues between Paddy Clarke and the young Dedalus—the biggest stretch being her comparison of red and green water bottles in Paddy Clarke to Dante's brushes in A Portrait. Doyle, for his part, maintains that he was "unaware of Joyce" as an influence; if, indeed, one could place both under the category of "Dublin novelists—comic," Joyce and Doyle nonetheless seem as different as they are similar. To note one obvious dissimilarity, Doyle still lives in the Dublin of his birth, interacting with and investing in the culture about which he writes: there has been no romantic continental exile for him. White's Joyce-attentiveness hardly forces destructive comparisons, but...

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