Customer Reviews

Paula Spencer. Roddy Doyle

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 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!

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

A couple of other reviewers have told what story there is to this novel,so I won't try to enlarge on it.
Really,there is not much story at all.What we see; is what life is like to a woman who has not have an easy time of it ;and that is an under statement.
Paula,is now 48,and she has lived what should have been the best years of her life,and we are taken right into her heart and soul for a year or so.
It is not pretty,but Paula is not defeated by remorse or even worrying about why her lot is what it is. All she wants to do is "get along" and even the least amount of joy she is able to have,she is thankful for. Though she is never envious of others,and she has every reason to be, she takes each day as it comes.Will tomorrow be better? Who knows,Paula now lives her life, entwined with her few close friends and disfunctional family,one day at a time.Despite it all,she hasn't an enemy in the world.She doesn't even carry a bit of hatred in her heart for her now dead abusive ex-husband.
No doubt,Doyle shows what a life some people lead.Of course,many women's lot in life is worse than Paula's and many's lot is better.But this is Paula's .There is always hope,and without that ,what is there to live for?

I am so sorry I've finished this book already and long for the sequel: Can Paula make it with a birdwatcher? Every little detail was perfect and the story about ACOAs is pathetic but brave. No one else has described so well the feelings of the recovering alcoholic (as a mother) or anyone who has escaped an abusive relationship (as a mother). The guilt, the sudden feelings of great happiness over nothing more than a ray of sunshine but..."selection boxes" what are they? And White Sripes? there are other inscrutable itemes as well that you have to be Irish to know what the heck they are.

A first glance at Roddy Doyle's 2006 novel Paula Spencer suggests that it is simply a sequel to his 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors, but really it is so much more!

Although Doyle wrote these novels ten years apart, I read them back to back, expecting and preparing myself for much of the same in the second novel as in the first. The Woman Who Walked into Doors is a brutal blow to the gut and it had me gasping for air. It is a harsh and bleak portrayal of a thirty-nine year old, working-class Dublin housewife, Paula Spencer ~ a negligent mother of four, a fiercely battered spouse and a chronic alcoholic. It leaves off with Paula, the widow of murderous, violent, wife-beater Charlo, trying to meet the demands of her four neglected children and her full blown alcoholism. Paula cleans offices and houses to scrape together enough money, not so much to feed her kids as to buy enough vodka to satisfy her hopeless addiction to alcohol. This Paula is a pathetic creature, tortured in mind, body and soul. When her husband isn't knocking her senseless she has her drink doing the same. Yet there is a strength in this Paula that suggests hope and the promise of redemption. This is the thread picked up inPaula Spencer, nine years later.

Paula emerges in the second novel as a forty-eight year old widow who has stopped drinking months before the new story begins. Unlike the first person narrative voice of The Woman Who Walked into Doors, the voice of a Paula lost in the onslaught of domestic violence and drunkeness, Doyle shifts to a third person narrative in Paula Spencer. The reader now witnesses a Paula who is awakening, slowly. This is not a book about Paula, the victim...it is a book about Paula, the recovering.

Most essentially, this is a book about reconciliation and healing, about a mother, who after almost twenty years of abuse and alcoholism, still has a family and needs and seeks their forgiveness. Paula Spencer is really more a love story: a story of a recovering alcoholic mother trying to love and be loved by her children. Each relationship is unique and difficult and not all are successful. Life remains challenging but Paula works desperately to deal with the post-effects of her earlier abusive marriage and her addiction to alcohol. The threat of alcohol always looms everywhere but Paula triumphs over her previous demons and resurfaces as a woman in recovery ~ a woman who fumbles trying to find her way again, but fumbles with a good humor, with honesty, with a sense of fun, with dignity and with determination.

One need not read The Woman Who Walked into Doors before reading Paula Spencer. Doyle remains faithful to his plotting and characterizations and provides review of the past through Paula's memories and inner monologues. His depictions of the details of a life in recovery are honest and genuine without banality and self-pity. His tone is softer and kinder and fully dedicated to showing the effect and impact of Paula's behavior and circumstance, but in an genuine and convincing way. The narrative is more grounded now. It is also relentless and fearful, confusing and contradictory, trivial and mundane. But Paula is healing now and she emerges as likable...intensely likable! And yes she is ordinary but she is valuable.

Her mantra is a splendid mantra for all the Paula Spencers in this world ~

"One day at a time.
Sweet Jesus..."

I'm surprised to be recommending a book about an alcoholic middle aged mum so enthusiastically, but if you read Paula Spencer and don't love it, there's a good chance you're an idiot.

I didn't pick this up for a couple of weeks after I bought it - I wasn't ready for what I thought might be a dark read, but I needn't have worried. I'm sorry to have finished it.

"Paula Spencer," published about a decade later than its prequel, "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors," is a quieter, but just as moving, story. The reader, who was introduced to Paula as a working class Irishwoman struggling with alcoholism and an abusive husband, now finds her recovering from alcoholism but still coping with family problems, after her husband passed away. She has a job cleaning houses, which has its perks, she winds up seeing the White Stripes in concert. The book's scenes center around her attempts to reconcile with her four children, two of whom are addicts, and relationship with her sisters, who are dealing with trials of their own.

This book is less dramatic (no murders or first person descriptions of abuse) but equally black humored and engaging. Recommended.

I really wish more people in the U.S. read this guy's stuff. He's such a gorgeous, heart-breaking writer. And funny as hell to at times.

"One tit."

One of the best lines ever.

Thank you, Roddy Doyle. I'm learning from you...

Great book, right on target for the quality that Roddy Doyle shows in each and every one of his books.