The everyday drama of walking a carefully sober line
“SHE copes. A lot of the time. Most of the time. She copes. And sometimes she doesn’t. Cope. At all.”
So begins “Paula Spencer,” Roddy Doyle’s new novel about the heroine of “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors” (1996). We recognize Paula, a working-class Irishwoman, now 47, four months and five days past her last drink and holding on to sobriety for dear life. We recognize her voice from the previous book, even though this story is told in the third person, not the first as in “Doors,” and Doyle’s sentences have grown shorter, staccato, as if tiring, running out of breath.
Same voice, different tone. In the previous novel, Paula was 39, still a beauty under her bruises, and her life was a melodrama, blurred but enhanced by an alcoholic haze. Her husband, Charlo, a handsome, charismatic criminal, beat her for years before he murdered a hostage in a bank robbery and was shot dead by Dublin police.
Now Paula must live without melodrama; the plainness of Doyle’s style and the distancing effect of the third person suggest the extent of her loss. More even than the taste of liquor, Paula misses the excitement, the “crack” liquor provided, the way it made her life seem meaningful, even as it ruined her. Sobriety may be good for her, but it isn’t much fun.
Paula knows that nothing thrilling and life-transforming is going to happen to her, ever. She scratches out a living, without benefits, cleaning houses four days a week and offices five nights a week. Nothing relieves her sore back or the aches where Charlo hit her; nothing glosses over the guilt toward her four children, whom she knows she neglected and damaged.
John Paul, the oldest, became a heroin addict. If he’s clean now, it’s not because of any help Paula gave him. Nicola, the older girl, is all right -- selling sportswear. Sixteen-year-old Jack, still at home, is almost too well-behaved, warily watching his mother for signs of relapse. But 22-year-old Leanne is drinking herself into a stupor, hiding vodka bottles and beer cans around the house.
Ordinarily, Paula tosses the booze out if she finds it. But once, at a low ebb, she reaches under Leanne’s bed in hope of finding a drink for herself. “She’s stretching.... It hurts. Her face cuts into the bed frame. She has it. A can.” She puts it to her mouth. “She knows, but she does it. It’s empty. She can taste it, dried, on the lip of the can. She can taste -- it’s nothing. Nothing there to lick.”
As for the long-dead Charlo, “she still hates him, the bastard.... But she loved him too. If he walked in now she’d love him. He’d save her life, just walking in. He’d lift her out of this existence.” But this life is all there is for Paula now, and it’s Doyle’s considerable achievement to make the story of her struggle to stay on the wagon an interesting and, by and large, a triumphant one. She measures progress in tiny steps. She’s promoted to supervisor of a cleaning crew. She opens a bank account. She takes up cooking again -- when she was drinking, it was too much trouble. She promises Jack she’ll buy him a computer -- and follows through, after so many failures. She meets a man -- an older man, a bit of a dry stick, certainly no Charlo, but nice. She enjoys her grandchildren.
Some things survive sobriety. These include Paula’s sense of humor, her tough, slangy sense of herself, her honesty. Cleaning up litter at rock-concert venues, she becomes interested in new music: U2 and the White Stripes. Awareness of the outside world starts to filter in -- the Ulster peace process, the Terri Schiavo case, the death of her older son’s namesake, the pope. Paula notices that the other cleaners are all immigrants now, and her personal story seems to evoke -- though Doyle, confining himself to her thoughts and feelings, doesn’t force the comparison -- Ireland’s recent rise from perennially poor country to a nation now dubbed the Celtic Tiger.
Melodrama she leaves to others. Paula’s older sister, Carmel, gets breast cancer; the younger, Denise, has an extramarital affair. Even Jack gets into trouble when he posts criticism of one of his teachers on the Web. For herself, though, Paula knows, “She has to be careful. For the rest of her life.... Every word, every little decision.” We might think being careful would be thin material for fiction, but Doyle, who won the 1993 Booker Prize for “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,” has the skill and, above all, the patience to pull it off.
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Michael Harris is a Southern California-based book critic and author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon.”
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