The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle
Keen, Suzanne
IRISH TROUBLES The Woman Who Walked into Doors Roddy Doyle Viking. $22.95,226 pp. Suzanne Keen I have read each of Roddy Doyle's novels (The Commitments [1988], The Snapper [1990], The Van...
...The impoverished explanation for Paula's over-long patience with her abuser is twinned in the novel by a complete lack of interest in Charlo's motivations...
...she continues to find her brutal spouse sexually attractive despite his repeated attacks on her...
...This gives the novel a sense of foreboding that The Woman Who Walked into Doors entirely lacks...
...I find it strange to be bored by a novel about pain, especially since the story Doyle tells contributes to the exposure of the scandalous epidemic of violence against women...
...He wasn't gorgeous...
...Perhaps for this reason it is an example of that rare phenomenon, a novel improved by being rendered in film—in Alan Parker's 1991 movie of the same title...
...Suzanne Keen, a frequent Commonweal contributor, teaches English at Washington and Lee University.ngton and Lee University...
...He hits her...
...Paula's voice, in which the entire novel is related, combines convincing staccato storytelling, slangy working-class diction, frank revelations, and agonized reconstruction of the past in sometimes profane and often touching tones...
...In the ensuing sections Doyle succeeds in showing the gradual increase in Paula's realism about her husband, as she ceases to "make him nice" retroactively...
...The Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha explores with remarkable subtlety the development of a small boy's inferiority and empathy, as he simultaneously masters language and discovers a new understanding of pain...
...A turning point in the novel occurs when Paddy overhears his father slapping his mother...
...Yet I think that in The Woman Who Walked into Doors Doyle takes his customary radical limitation of perspective in a rather more predictable direction, one that ultimately hinders the effect of the book...
...The Commitments reads almost like a screenplay...
...Unlike Paddy Clarke, she has no special affinity for language...
...Here Paula remembers her teen-aged self, both attracted and repelled by the man she will so disastrously marry: He was a ride...
...He hits her...
...They'd have picked me up and carried me home...
...I believed in Paula the imaginary human being enough to feel appalled for her...
...And so forth...
...He hits her and kicks her...
...This gives the novel a sense of foreboding that The Woman Who Walked into Doors entirely lacks...
...The topic of the novel commands the reader's attention: thirty-nine-year-old Paula Spencer, a working-class Irishwoman, recalls as much as she can about eighteen years of abuse at the hands of her husband Charlo...
...All we know is that he's great in the sack (he improves after that first encounter in the fields), that he drinks, and that he comes from an abusive family himself...
...Perhaps for this reason it is an example of that rare phenomenon, a novel improved by being rendered in film—in Alan Parker's 1991 movie of the same title...
...The somewhat sensational fate of Charlo, killed by the police as he ineffectually flees a murder-scene, Doyle handles without melodrama...
...In Paddy Clarke, the rigorous confinement of the fiction to the child's mind and voice works because he is both victim and witness, and because the reader can always see a bit more rapidly than he does what the signs and portents Paddy records really mean...
...The paucity of Paula's language, a direct consequence of Doyle's rigorous technique, ultimately makes her story tedious to read...
...I'd done something good...
...But as Elaine Scarry observes in The Body in Pain, pain obliterates language...
...Unlike Paddy Clarke, she has no special affinity for language...
...that single offstage blow oddly seems more painful to this reader than the horrific catalog of injuries in The Woman Who Walked into Doors...
...Yet I think that in The Woman Who Walked into Doors Doyle takes his customary radical limitation of perspective in a rather more predictable direction, one that ultimately hinders the effect of the book...
...The Commitments reads almost like a screenplay...
...Though these bare facts may agree with the sociological picture of an abuser, they do little to augment Doyle's detailed choreography of the method of Charlo's beatings...
...There was never anything gorgeous about him...
...The resulting monotony of action poses a narrative problem that I had Perhaps because for the first time in this novel Doyle limits himself to a woman's perspective, critics have celebrated his taking "a daring step in a new direction," as the publicity for the novel cheers...
...Charlo stood up...
...He hits her and knocks her teeth out...
...Because Doyle lets us know from the start that Charlo has died, and because he takes care to present his characters and their worsening situation without any glamour, his readers are left with a relatively simple story portraying a victim...
...He hits her and knocks her teeth out...
...He hits her and kicks her...
...Paddy's experience of pain becomes more complex as the inevitable break-up of his parents grows nearer, and he gains the capacity to imagine, rather than simply enjoy what he calls "the crunch of someone else's pain...
...The terse concluding remarks of the novel, after Paula has finally driven Charlo out of the house, represent a triumph: "It was a great feeling...
...And so forth...
...Perhaps because for the first time in this novel Doyle limits himself to a woman's perspective, critics have celebrated his taking "a daring step in a new direction," as the publicity for the novel cheers...
...they wouldn't have fucked me in a field in the first place, not one of the fields where I came from that weren't really fields at all, just bits left over after the building was finished...
...It would have helped if he'd been gorgeous, like Robert Red-ford or Lee Majors...
...Doyle indicts the doctors, nurses, neighbors, and family members who accept Paula's lame excuses, the "walking into doors" of the title, but he does not entirely exonerate his protagonist of a dangerous reticence...
...Suzanne Keen I have read each of Roddy Doyle's novels (The Commitments [1988], The Snapper [1990], The Van [1991], and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha [1993]) with increasing enjoyment and admiration, so it is with real disappointment that I must report that in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Doyle reaches the limits of his technique...
...When we made love the first time in the field when we were drunk, especially me, and I didn't really know what was happening, only his weight and wanting to get sick...
...In Paddy Clarke, the rigorous confinement of the fiction to the child's mind and voice works because he is both victim and witness, and because the reader can always see a bit more rapidly than he does what the signs and portents Paddy records really mean...
...The repetition of action demands an escalation that is distasteful, in this case, to desire...
...Indeed, the reader may wonder why it takes her so long to pick up the frying pan...
...Paddy's experience of pain becomes more complex as the inevitable break-up of his parents grows nearer, and he gains the capacity to imagine, rather than simply enjoy what he calls "the crunch of someone else's pain...
...Fuckin' cold...
...The resulting monotony of action poses a narrative problem that I had always imagined was particular to what my dad calls "shattering-glass epic" movies...
...All we know is that he's great in the sack (he improves after that first encounter in the fields), that he drinks, and that he comes from an abusive family himself...
...Though these bare facts may agree with the sociological picture of an abuser, they do little to augment Doyle's detailed choreography of the method of Charlo's beatings...
...I felt terrible after it, scared and soggy, guilty and sore...
...The impoverished explanation for Paula's over-long patience with her abuser is twinned in the novel by a complete lack of interest in Charlo's motivations...
...Doyle does not make Paula a cut-out martyr: she struggles with alcoholism...
...Paula Spencer is a trickier kind of witness: one who has blacked out and been knocked unconscious too often to tell her story "straight...
...Doyle's success with a woman's voice will not surprise readers who recall the pungent utterances of Sharon in The Barrytoivn Trilogy...
...That limitation of perspective means that we cannot see what the doctors, nurses, and relatives see, or fail to register...
...They've crashed the elevator, and escaped the bus, so now they have to wreck a subway train...
...Paula Spencer is a trickier kind of witness: one who has blacked out and been knocked unconscious too often to tell her story "straight...
...It was the best way to describe him, from the first time I heard of him to the last time I saw him...
...Further, it means that Charlo remains just as much a cipher to us as he is to his wife, who, after battering him with a frying pan, still registers his charms: "His hair hung over his face and for a second he looked funny and lovely...
...Yet the deliberately disordered storytelling, jumbled up to mimic Paula's patchy memory, the repetitions, and the unvaried rhythm of the prose make a novel that ought to be riveting into a boring book...
...Nothing wrong with that...
...That limitation of perspective means that we cannot see what the doctors, nurses, and relatives see, or fail to register...
...The Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha explores with remarkable subtlety the development of a small boy's inferiority and empathy, as he simultaneously masters language and discovers a new understanding of pain...
...that single offstage blow oddly seems more painful to this reader than the horrific catalog of injuries in The Woman Who Walked into Doors...
...Doyle's success with a woman's voice will not surprise readers who recall the pungent utterances of Sharon in The Barrytoivn Trilogy...
...Doyle's early novels rely very heavily on pure scene, in which dialogue rather than inner thoughts dominates...
...Further, it means that Charlo remains just as much a cipher to us as he is to his wife, who, after battering him with a frying pan, still registers his charms: "His hair hung over his face and for a second he looked funny and lovely...
...A turning point in the novel occurs when Paddy overhears his father slapping his mother...
...I do not doubt the authenticity of this voice, and I admire the evocation of poverty not only in the setting—the leftover fields—and in the man's callous remark, but in the woman's denuded vocabulary of desire: he's a "ride," he's not "gorgeous...
...Doyle's early novels rely very heavily on pure scene, in which dialogue rather than inner thoughts dominates...
Vol. 123 • October 1996 • No. 17
