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Paula Spencer: A Novel
by Roddy Doyle
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Synopses & Reviews Ten years after the bestselling The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Roddy Doyle resurrects one of his greatest characters.
When Roddy Doyle published The Woman Who Walked into Doors in 1996, critics and readers alike hailed it as a tour de force of literary ventriloquism that captured both the vulnerability and strength of a thirty-nine-year-old Dublin housewife with a fondness for drink. Now, Doyle triumphantly returns to Paula Spencer with the moving tale of her fight for a better future.
Paula is now almost forty-eight years old. Her abusive husband Charlo is long dead, and it's been four months and five days since she's had a drink. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her, but she worries about Leanne. Paula continues to work as a cleaner, and the fridge is often half empty. But for the first time in her life she is going to parent-teacher meetings, and she's bought a CD player for the kitchen, where she surprises her sisters with her taste for U2 and The White Stripes. Readers will root for Paula as she slowly begins to put her life back together. She's even met a man at the bottle return; he's nice, there's something steady about him.
Told with the unmistakable wit of his extraordinary voice, this is a redemptive tale that will have Doyle fans cheering. Review: "The heroine of Doyle's 1996 bestseller, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, returns long widowed (abusive husband Charlo having been killed fleeing the Irish police) and four months sober. Those absences and old relationships mark the year we follow in Paula's new life: she worries that her daughter, Leanne, is following in her footsteps; negotiates her resentment of her bossy older daughter, Nicola; and reconciles with her son, John Paul, now a recovering heroin addict with two kids of his own. Doyle, Booker Winner for Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha and author of The Commitments, does a lot in this novel by doing little: it is John Paul's quiet distance, for example, that serves as a constant reminder of the horrendous mother and pitiful alcoholic Paula used to be. The newfound prosperity of Ireland affects Paula's day-to-day life on the bottom of the economic scale — which suddenly looks a lot different. Paula's inner life lacks subtler shades, and her outer life is full of tiring work, abstinence from liquor and family. These aren't elements that automatically make for a have-to-read novel, but in this wholly and vividly imagined case, they do." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Ten years ago, in his superb novel 'The Woman Who Walked into Doors,' the Irish writer Roddy Doyle introduced his readers to Paula Spencer, a tough, passionate, alcoholic Irishwoman with a foul mouth and an unsparing working-class wit. As the book opens, the police inform Paula that her estranged husband, Charlo, has been shot and killed while committing robbery and murder. From there, the book swoops ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) back and forth through episodes of Paula's life: her mostly happy childhood; her whirlwind courtship with Charlo; their marriage and their four children; and, most important, the 17 years of violent abuse she suffered at the hands of Charlo, whom she continued to love until the day he died. In the book's harrowing climactic scene, Paula finally clobbers her wretched husband with a frying pan and throws him out of the house forever. The novel was, as I said in these pages 10 years ago, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, an unsentimental yet not hopeless account of an ordinary woman living a very hard life. Now, in Doyle's new novel, 'Paula Spencer,' life is better for Paula, but not by much. Still cleaning houses for a living, she's worked her way up to supervisor, making more money than she ever has before, but otherwise her entire life is like a good news/bad news joke. She's a recovering alcoholic with a recent and hard-won sobriety, but she still craves the booze. Her oldest daughter, Nicola, has grown up to become a successful if stressed middle-class businesswoman, but her oldest son, John Paul, disappeared for years into heroin addiction — though he, too, is in recovery and has recently renewed contact with Paula. Her two other children still live with Paula, and while Leanne has become an alcoholic like her mother, the youngest, Jack, is a smart, sensitive and largely untroubled boy, though he has learned from hard experience not to trust or rely on his mother. And, finally, while Paula no longer has a violent husband who beats her regularly, she has no man in her life at all and hasn't had one since Charlo died. If 'Paula Spencer' doesn't quite reach the heights or plumb the depths that the earlier book did, it's only because the first novel was richer by design, encompassing through flashbacks the whole of Paula's life, and more inherently dramatic, since it centered on the appalling violence inflicted on its narrator. As a result, 'The Woman Who Walked into Doors' was necessarily more complex, with an artfully jumbled chronology and long blocks of pure exposition in Paula's own voice, evoking a more accessible version of the high Irish modernism of Joyce and Beckett. 'Paula Spencer,' on the other hand, returns to the simpler, less inflected style of Doyle's earlier, more lighthearted novels of Irish working-class life, 'The Commitments,' 'The Snapper' and 'The Van.' Told in the third person instead of the earlier novel's pungent first person, 'Paula Spencer' is largely chronological, following one year of Paula's life, from her 48th birthday to her 49th, and it is largely made up of extended scenes between Paula and her children, her friends and her two lively sisters, Carmel and Denise. If it's less harrowing and artistically pyrotechnic than the earlier book, that's only because Paula's life, thank God, is much calmer than it was before. The book's simpler rhythms reflect the more forgiving spirit of middle age. Lest this sound like faint praise, let me add that reading 'Paula Spencer' is pure, undiluted pleasure, and it's not necessary to have read the first novel to thoroughly enjoy this one. Paula is still a very funny woman (and her sharp-tongued sister Carmel is even funnier), and Doyle himself is still the master of the extended set-piece. There's a lunch scene with Paula and her two sisters that goes on for 20 pages, and I read it twice, just because it was such fun and so beautifully crafted. In between the tart, sisterly wisecracks, Paula the recovering alcoholic watches her sisters drink: 'Denise pours some of the Ballygowan (mineral water) into her wine glass. She's over the hump, Paula guesses. Now she's just thirsty. Paula's thirsty all the time. She lowers the water, day and night. She brings a plastic bottle with her, with tap water, whenever she thinks of it; when she remembers. And it's the thing that's there when the situation is tricky. ... When the talk is awkward, the past or the present — it's the roaring thirst. The dry throat that actually takes over her whole body. And it's not alcohol; that's not what she needs — that's a different one. It's just water — dehydration. But it's nearly the same need. She can't cope until she feels the water crawling down through her, and up to the place behind her forehead, the pain there, and the joints right below her ears. Like oil. Calming her, softening the dry edges.' In the end, it would be a stretch to say that Paula is happy now. None of her children trusts her entirely; she still works at a physically demanding job that would tax a woman half her age, and, most of all, she still wrestles every moment with her sobriety, with her guilt for the way she failed her children and with her loneliness. She is, however, happier, and Doyle recognizes that it's often the people with the most difficult lives who cling to hope the hardest — who know that contentment, if it comes at all, comes an inch at a time. James Hynes is the author, most recently, of the novel 'Kings of Infinite Space.'" Reviewed by James Hynes, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "[Doyle's] dialogue, thick with Dublinese, expertly evokes the working-class Irish milieu. Although the third-person narration will make some readers miss Paula's voice, this is Paula's story — and it's grand." Booklist Review: "The four grown Spencer offspring, Paula's two sisters, and a promising romantic interest make up an entertaining supporting cast. Highly recommended." Library Journal Review: " Paula Spencer does for alcoholism what The Woman Who Walked Into Doors did for domestic violence: makes it real for those lucky to have no firsthand experience of it." San Francisco ChronicleReview: Review: "We might think being careful would be thin material for fiction, but Doyle...has the skill and, above all, the patience to pull it off." Los Angeles Times Review: "This novel is a welcome return to form for Doyle." Philadelphia Inquirer Review: "Though the narrative might meander a tad much, this deeply empathetic novel comes to a suitably indeterminate ending." Houston Chronicle About the Author Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of 6 acclaimed novels, and Rory and Ita, a memoir of his parents. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780670038169
- Author:
- Doyle, Roddy
- Publisher:
- Viking Books
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Widows
- Subject:
- Women domestics
- Publication Date:
- January 2007
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 281
- Dimensions:
- 8.54x5.70x.97 in. .88 lbs.
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