Customer Reviews

Rory & Ita (Signed)

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Since the other reviews here don't touch on what I see as the strengths of this book, here's my take.

Roddy Doyle's first work of non-fiction is a low-key but deeply felt paean to his parents (and by extension life in mid-twentieth-century Dublin) in their own words. In alternating chapters, Rory and Ita Doyle tell of their immediate ancestors (including their own parents), their childhoods, meeting and marriage, and their life as a married couple, including seeing their children leave the nest as they ease into retirement. Details accumulate and create a pointillistic portrait of two people enmeshed in a large network of family and community ties, many less than idyllic, and of a group of lives lived with affection and a kind of quiet but ceaseless vigor.

Real tragedy is a thread that runs through the book: Ita's own mother died when she was very young, and one of her children lived only a day. Her comment at the very end of the book is stoic but not self-dramatizing, and all the more moving for it.

And the turbulent larger world is not ignored, but seen mostly in how it affects the family. Rory and Ita began life in what was essentially a nineteenth century world, and end this story in the twenty-first. The continuity of their lives, their sense of wonder at the new tempered by a sardonic sense that everything fresh must be evaluated carefully, makes their discussion of everything from Fred Astaire movies to the Internet interesting.

The larger world also figures in other ways. Mentioned often, the violent history of Ireland, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, affects the choices made, not to mention the choices available, to many of the people mentioned. But as with American books about "the greatest generation," a key point is that those involved in the struggle knew what they were fighting for: the opportunity to go home and live what are, after all, ordinary lives. The anonyms who constitute the vast majority of all humans who have lived anywhere on this planet are by implication the real subjects of this book. And, perhaps, this book may also serve as a reminder that passion need not be fierce to be strong.