Why Roddy’s Smiledropsoff at the end
A chance meeting reopens old wounds but, ultimately, Doyle’s 11th novel is undone by its (un)happy ending
THIS is almost the best novel Roddy Doyle has written. There is a strong case for considering it his best work since Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Smile is undone, though, by a closing plot twist that undermines the structure Doyle had built to sometimes powerful effect over the preceding 200 pages.
There are readers who may accept the big reveal in the concluding pages but it is a clunky and unconvincing device. Worse, it is unnecessary: for most of the book,
Smile is a consideration of memory and how reverberations from childhood shape a life through adulthood.
On those terms, it is sometimes excellent but the attempt at a more ambitious conclusion should be considered a failure.
Victor Forde is in his 50s, returned to the coastal Dublin town where he grew up. His marriage is over and he is renting a small apartment in an unremarkable development. He visits the supermarket for provisions as part of his first steps into his shaky new life.
‘I half filled my new fridge and put things up on the corner shelves. I put the salt on the table and started my first shopping list.’
He starts to frequent a local pub and soon meets Ed Fitzpatrick, a loud, boorish builder, comfortable with the salty argot familiar in Doyle’s work. He claims to have gone to school with Victor but the narrator has no memory of him.
Unreliability is woven throughout the work.
Victor wants to make his visits to the pub habitual as he seeks friend- ship and routine. He starts to drink with a regular group and Doyle is free to cut loose his enthusiasm for the lingua franca of the Dublin pub.
It is a setting he has visited before, to mixed effect and the exchanges in this environment are pedestrian and uninspired.
Doyle made his name with books about the daily life of Dubliners but the Barrytown trilogy and Paddy
Clarke Ha Ha Ha were remarkable for two compelling reasons.
One was their evocation of working-class Dublin.
Doyle’s early work was arresting because literary Ireland had not plunged into that blue-collar, often hardscrabble world with much seriousness since Sean O’Casey but he made it vivid anew.
That is not the landscape of Smile. Instead, it is the Dublin of today, balanced between the recession and a future where hope and caution and the fear of more pain all lurk.
The second reason for Doyle’s success was his writing about childhood. This was especially true in
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1993, and Victor’s memories of growing up are undoubtedly the strongest part of this new work.
Doyle writes brilliantly about the uncertainties of a young boy’s life. Secondary school for Victor is shaped by two traumas: the death of his father, and the sexual abuse he suffers from a Christian Brother.
Both track him like bloodhounds to the present day. Fitzpatrick knows of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the school principal and it is obvious from the start that the uneasiness Victor feels in his company is linked in some way to his past.
Victor’s career never takes firm shape. He is not the writer he aspired to be – and he is not a journalist either – but rather a talking head, a controversialist happy to appear on radio shows.
Both the type and the format are recognisable from our media landscape and are well observed by Doyle.
However, this part of Victor’s life is not convincingly realised. The writer struggling to fill blank pages is familiar to the point of cliché, while Victor’s wife Rachel never takes firm shape.
She is a beautiful entrepreneur who becomes famous through her appearances on TV shows but neither she nor her relationship with Victor are fully drawn.
From his first contact with her we are meant to accept her as an ideal.
‘She shifted slightly, so she was leaning into me and I watched her drink for the first time. Her leg, her shoulder, her breast were pressing against me and now her chin almost touched mine while she knocked back a fifth of her pint, leaned out and put the glass back down on the table and came back up to me.’
As the novel develops she becomes less a person than a plot device, in the light of whose wonder Victor’s failings are starkly illuminated.
The narrator struggles with the adjustments of a new, unknown life, and a haunted past he cannot fully trust. The unfaithfulness of memory is the book’s strongest theme. It is a point raised by Fitzpatrick.
‘I hate that. The memory. It’s like dropping bits of yourself as you go along isn’t it?
‘I didn’t answer. I have a good memory – or I thought I did. I still didn’t know who he was.’
Victor’s questions are eventually answered but it is in attempting to provide a neat summation that Doyle weakens a novel that works best among the doubt and misremembering of the past.
‘Big reveal is clunky and unconvincing. Worse, it is unnecessary’