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Roddy Doyle’s highly anticipated novel Smile hit bookshelves at the beginning of this month to mixed reviews. It tells the story of Victor Forde, a middle-aged, failed music journalist who moves back to his hometown following the breakdown of his marriage. He begins a lonely pilgrimage to Donnelly’s pub each night “for one slow pint.” Interrupted by a man in a pink shirt one evening, Victor is forced to remember a past he had thought buried. With distressing clarity, five years of violence at the hands of the Christian Brothers bubbles to the surface at a mere suggestion from his new drinking partner.
Smile is an undoubtedly fine novel, displaying Doyle’s famed mastery of dialogue and ventriloquist-like ability to assume the identities of his characters. The pub conversations can sometimes tend towards the banal, but if you enjoyed Two Pints the kitsch won’t bother you. Unlike most of Doyle’s fiction, this is not a funny book and is perhaps better compared to The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.
The novel’s strength lies in Doyle’s precise yet impressionistic evocation of the workings of memory and trauma. Childhood trauma is rendered in a manner that is at once harshly exact and vexingly evasive. Memory both creeps up on Victor in small steps and batters him in great crashing waves. It can prove unreliable and fails him when has most need of it: “The memory. It’s like dropping bits of yourself as you go along, isn’t it?” Similarly, Doyle’s prose is both impeccable and confounding, leading the reader into folly as much as clarification.
Finer still is Doyle’s characteristically excellent portrait of Ireland, and of Dublin in particular. While often on the nose—Victor’s work-in-progress is titled Ireland: A Horror Story—Doyle’s detailed representation of seventies, eighties, and present-day Ireland provides an unerringly complete backdrop for his plot. He neatly and sympathetically draws parallels across the decades. “The rhythm of the middle-aged Dub” and the performative nature of schoolyard bravado mirror one another, while Victor’s observations of the abortion referendum of 1983 nod to the position women currently hold in Irish society.
Though one cannot wish to give too much away, no review of this novel could comfortably leave out its shocking ending. It shreds with vicious alacrity everything we thought we knew about Victor and the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Brother McIntyre. While it impressively captures the lurching processes of the traumatised mind, the ending abandons the reader to mounting confusion.
A timely and stunningly poignant novel wrought with great wit and pathos— though hardly flawless— Smile should make a welcome addition to anyone’s Roddy Doyle collection.
