Product Description

“Pure, undiluted pleasure” (The Washington Post) from Booker Prize–winning author Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle ’s beautifully wrought tale revisits the Dublin housewife-heroine of his earlier acclaimed novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Paula is now forty-seven, her abusive husband is long dead, and it’s been four months and five days since she’s had a drink. She cleans offices to get by and lives from paycheck to paycheck. But as she manages to get through each day sober, she begins to piece her life back together and to resurrect her family. Told with the unmistakable wit of Doyle’s unique voice, this is a redemptive tale about a brave and tenacious woman.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #659822 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-28
• Released on: 2006-12-28
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by James Hynes 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 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.

Reviewed by James Hynes
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Surviving an abusive marriage was an enormous triumph for Dublin housewife Paula Spencer. Her frequent beatings by husband Charlo, coupled with the alcohol she consumed to dull the pain, left her life a black hole of misery and degradation, which she recounted in her own voice in The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996). Ten years later, Doyle resurrects his heroine. Now recently sober and trying to maintain some semblance of normality in her family life, Paula fights battles that are small, but the stakes are extremely high. Be it just trying to ask her daughter what time she came home last night or tousle her son's hair, after her ignoble history, every act is loaded with significance. Nicola, Paula's eldest, took on many of the maternal roles Paula was incapable of doing herself. Now, the ever-present guilt and the constant need for a drink plague her. How can she regain parental authority? Will her children ever trust her again? Doyle is masterful at setting up the battles as Paula takes each day at a time. His 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. Benjamin Segedin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Perfection
My God, but this is a gorgeous book. Doyle is completely inside the mind and soul of this woman. Yes, Paula Spencer had a awful life with an abusive husband and her own alcoholism. But what Doyle does so gloriously is show this woman coming to life, being reborn and seeing the world anew as the fog of her addiction lifts day by day, wisp by wisp. What's revealed is an intelligent, discerning woman with a streak of humor that saves her (and the reader) time and again. Part of her re-birth is connecting with ther four children, learning what it means to be a Mom. The pages where she's urging Jack, her wary 16 year old, to take some homemade soup is as beautiful as any fiction I've read in years.

Roddy Doyle Does it Again
Roddy Doyle is probably my favorite contemporary author. Time and again, he's been able to capture the essence of Irish life. "The Woman who Walked into Doors," this novel's prequel, presented a battered Paula Spencer living in the Celtic Tiger period of the 90s.

I am an American who lived in Ireland during the time "Paula Spencer" takes place, and I can't tell you how amazingly-well Doyle captures Ireland at this moment in time. Eastern Europeans are entering the country in droves, everybody's text-messaging, and it's a completely different Ireland from the one ten years ago. I even remember the little boy he talks about who went missing in Cork. That story was all over the news when I was there.

Backdrop aside, Doyle continues to be a master of character development. I feel as if I know Paula Spencer intimately, and I constantly have to remind myself this novel was written by a man.

In short, Roddy Doyle is a genius!

"Sober, hard-working, reliable--she's all these things--and she's talking to the fridge."
Continuing the story of Paula Spencer, the main character in his 1997 novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Booker Prize-winning author Roddy Doyle focuses on a survivor of horrific spousal abuse, a woman who has been on her own now for twelve years, and whose husband Charlo has been dead for eleven of those years. For this entire period, however, Paula has been lost in a fog of alcohol, and her eldest daughter Nicola has been the "mother" of the family and Paula's own caretaker.

As the novel opens, Paula has been sober for four months, and as we watch the unfolding of her life for most of the ensuing year, we see every detail of her struggle to become responsible for the family and regain their trust. All the family has problems. Nicola, now married, was forced to be "mother" of the family while still a child herself; her brother John Paul, became addicted to heroin at age fourteen and ran away; Leanne, now twenty-two, lives at home, an alcoholic; and Jack, nearly sixteen, is closed off from his mother.

The novel, almost plotless, is an intense study of Paula's growth as she goes through the business of living an "ordinary" life--cleaning houses by day and offices by night, fretting about money and her need for a new coat, doing the family wash and making soup, visiting her senile mother, saving for a computer for Jack, and, most importantly, staying off alcohol. As Doyle takes us step by painful step through Paula's mundane reality, we see her slowly growing and taking control for the first time since her marriage. As she gains confidence, she works to reconnect with her sisters, form new relationships, and, clumsily, to become a real mother.

Doyle's style perfectly suits Paula's first-person narrative--short staccato sentences which reflect her nervous attention to simple actions, a style which concentrates on Paula's reactions to what is happening around her, rather than on description. Her internal monologue and her conversations with her children and sisters reveal her past history and her present hopes and dreams. Abrupt and sometimes terse, Doyle's narrative style reflects Paula's gradual progress and her small victories, the prosaic details told in the simple style of a woman who sees her life as a series of small steps. The limited scope of Paula's life and her everyday problems open up to reveal universal themes and truths, the age-old yearning to become independent, to accept responsibility, and to achieve personal respect. A memorable, carefully drawn study of the human spirit as it renews itself. n Mary Whipple