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Summary
Summary
Paula Spencer begins on the eve of Paula's forty-eighth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Having outlived an abusive husband and father, Paula and her four children are now struggling to live their adult lives, with two of the kids balancing their own addictions. Paula rebuilds her life slowly. As she goes about her daily routine working as a cleaning woman, and cooking for her two children at home, she re-establishes connections with her two sisters, her mother, and grandchildren, expanding her world. Doyle has movingly depicted a woman, both strong and fragile, who is fighting back and finally equipped to be a mother to her children.
Author Notes
Roddy Doyle is the author of five previous novels, including a Booker Prize nominee, The Van, and a Booker Prize winning international bestseller Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. He has also written several screenplays, most recently When Brendan Met Trudy. His first children's book, The Giggler Treatment, will be published in September by Scholastic. He lives in Dublin.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The heroine of Doyle's 1996 bestseller, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, returns long widowed (abusive husband Charlo having been killed fleeing the Irish police) and four months sober. Those absences and old relationships mark the year we follow in Paula's new life: she worries that her daughter, Leanne, is following in her footsteps; negotiates her resentment of her bossy older daughter, Nicola; and reconciles with her son, John Paul, now a recovering heroin addict with two kids of his own. Doyle, Booker Winner for Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha and author of The Commitments, does a lot in this novel by doing little: it is John Paul's quiet distance, for example, that serves as a constant reminder of the horrendous mother and pitiful alcoholic Paula used to be. The newfound prosperity of Ireland affects Paula's day-to-day life on the bottom of the economic scale which suddenly looks a lot different. Paula's inner life lacks subtler shades, and her outer life is full of tiring work, abstinence from liquor and family. These aren't elements that automatically make for a have-to-read novel, but in this wholly and vividly imagined case, they do. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Surviving an abusive marriage was an enormous triumph for Dublin housewife Paula Spencer. Her frequent beatings by husband Charlo, coupled with the alcohol she consumed to dull the pain, left her life a black hole of misery and degradation, which she recounted in her own voice in The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996). Ten years later, Doyle resurrects his heroine . Now recently sober and trying to maintain some semblance of normality in her family life, Paula fights battles that are small, but the stakes are extremely high. Be it just trying to ask her daughter what time she came home last night or tousle her son's hair, after her ignoble history, every act is loaded with significance. Nicola, Paula's eldest, took on many of the maternal roles Paula was incapable of doing herself. Now, the ever-present guilt and the constant need for a drink plague her. How can she regain parental authority? Will her children ever trust her again? Doyle is masterful at setting up the battles as Paula takes each day at a time. His dialogue, thick with Dublinese, expertly evokes the working-class Irish milieu. Although the third-person narration will make some readers miss Paula's voice, this is Paula's story--and it's grand. --Benjamin Segedin Copyright 2006 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Anatomy of Misery Paula Spencer is struggling to recover from her battered and alcoholic past in Roddy Doyle's new novel. PAULA SPENCER, a widowed working mother in north Dublin, has an exhausting job and four kids to fret about. At 47, she's still a "good-looking woman" who makes time to keep abreast of popular trends: taking in the odd White Stripes or Coldplay concert, Googling her name on the Internet, contemplating yoga and nursing the hope of one day meeting a suitable partner - like Joe, a retiree in a Nike hoodie whose wife left him for another woman. Guilty admission: the above summation is a capricious concentration of the scarce cheering bits that dot the lumpy gruel of Paula's life, like raisins scavenged from a happier woman's larder. Before you mistake Paula for a with-it new player in the budding genre of "mom lit" - the baby-on-board successor to chick lit, spearheaded by Allison Pearson in her very funny best-selling novel, "I Don't Know How She Does It" - bear in mind that the author of "Paula Spencer" is Roddy Doyle, and remember that the roots of mom lit began long before Sarah handpicked Hagar to be her surrogate. Remember too that Medea was also a mother, one whose story was told by others. Doyle first introduced readers to Paula a decade ago in the gripping faux-memoir, "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors," told in Paula's blindered first-person. Back then, she buoyantly recalled the rapture she felt on meeting her future husband: "I swooned the first time I saw Charlo. I actually did." A tough guy in a bomber jacket with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, Charlo "blew a gorgeous jet of smoke up into the light," and hooked her. "It got me then and it gets me now: cigarettes are sexy - they're worth the stench and the cancer. ... I wanted to go over there and bite him." One way or another, she did. And Charlo bit back. And punched and kicked and head-butted her, blacked her eyes, ripped out her hair, sent her to the hospital year after year. Early on, Paula took to drink, her spin on mother's little helper. By the time Charlo was killed during a botched hold-up, 17 years into the marriage, Paula was ravaged, her family in ruins, her identity shredded, her spirit coiled in a perpetual defensive crouch. It's a testament to the incantatory power of Doyle's writing in that earlier book that Paula's valiant will to glorify, not horrify, her past and to survive her present overshadows her husband's campaign to crush her. Back then, Doyle's narrative cunningly guided the reader with a trail of crumbs that took a meandering route before forking off into the torture chamber. Satisfyingly, the torturer died. The reader had hope that the victim would recover her full strength. But in this sequel, we meet Paula, roughly a decade on and only four months and five days sober. Her two older children, the gratingly self-sufficient Nicola and the former junkie John Paul, have their own kids and households; but the two youngest still live at home: Leanne, a scrappy, bed-wetting 22-year-old alcoholic, and teenage Jack, the pet, who is miraculously addiction-free. Paula catches him sniffing her breath to make sure she's clean and mourns the watchfulness her weakness has forced on him. As she struggles to dig herself out of the pit of alcoholism, to brush the dust off her bonds with the children who grew up under her damaged care, her failures overwhelm her. "You can't leave things behind," she thinks to herself. "They come with you. You can manage. That's the best you can expect." She knows she can't have her slate wiped clean, but she wishes it weren't so thickly marked. "I'm sick of feeling guilty," she rages inwardly, as Leanne baits her, slaps her. "Get over it! She wants to yell. Grow up and get out of my house," she thinks, "so I don't have to face you every day and feel guilty all over again." In a word: yeesh. As Paula's months of sobriety pile up, her efforts begin to gain traction. Still, it's slow going. "I haven't been a good mother," she says to her son in a moment of cautious rapprochement. "No, he says. - You haven't. ... But I don't have another one." Later, she torments herself: "Alcoholics can stop drinking but what is there for the children of alcoholics? Is it always too late? Probably." The thought is enough to drive you to drink. Nonetheless, Paula soldiers abstemiously on, determined to improve her family's lot, taking the sort of cleaning jobs only immigrants sign on for - "the only white woman in the van" - too late to catch the wave of prosperity that visited Ireland in the '90s. "She's been left behind," she realizes. "She knows that. But she's always known it." Listening to U2, whose members grew up in her own Dublin neighborhood, she recognizes the irony that "she was being hammered, battered to the floor, while they were becoming famous." Paula's story feels ageless, but it's not. The White Stripes concert she hears (she went to clean the stands, not to rock out) actually took place. Paula would have been 48 then, and 50 now. The ineluctable suffering of wives and mothers has been a time-honored staple of fiction from classical times to the present. The literary imagination insists that Hecuba must endure her children's deaths while Medea, betrayed, must kill hers. Anna Karenina strays from her marriage and pays; so does Madame Bovary. Dostoyevsky created one of the most gruesome images of female misery in "Crime and Punishment," in a dream about an overburdened mare whose cruel owner beats her to death after a lifetime of service. In other books (notably "The Snapper"), Roddy Doyle has sometimes cut his heroines more slack, without depriving them of the authenticity of misfortune. It's a tragic fact that abused, alcoholic women exist in abundance, and telling their stories in unsparing detail, as Doyle does, is both important and noble. But is it any wonder that some 21st-century writers have been recasting the female-lead template, multiplying the varieties of fiction written about women? In a freakish coincidence, Doyle's Paula Spencer has a real-world double whose fortunes contrast starkly with those of her fictional namesake. When Jack helps his mammy Google her name, they find 575,000 hits. It turns out that (quite literally) there is an American mother of four named Paula Spencer who has not remotely been "left behind." She's a momlit pathbreaker: a Woman's Day columnist and the author or co-author of numerous books, the most recent of which is titled, "Momfidence! An Oreo Never Killed Anybody and Other Secrets of Happier Parenting." It's all very well to titter ... but which Paula Spencer would you want for a mother? Doyle revisits Paula a decade on - and only four months and five days sober. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
I once met a poet on the train to Dublin; discussing a show at Liberty Hall, he made the kind of remark you might make to a group of creative writing students: "If you want to write for the people, you have to do better than that." This led me to speculate on a definition. Writing for the people: making a sympathetic character of a woman who has lost her son to heroin and her daughter to alcoholism while she colluded for 17 years in an abusive relationship; and doing so with simplicity in a language that never betrays the complexity of human nature but locates the emotion of someone drained of strength, fatigued by the struggle to understand what is oppressing them. This is the extent of Roddy Doyle's magnificent achievement in Paula Spencer , a sequel to his earlier novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors . If the first novel deals with the vicissitudes of mind, fantasy and delusion that allowed her to remain in a violent relationship, the sequel deals with the forensic process of recovery. It may not be the Belfast of the 1970s, but Paula Spencer is operating in a war zone. She has emerged from an abusive relationship with the collateral damage of alcoholism, and has been clean for four months and five days when the novel begins in June 2004. It is a journal of a mind which has been overwhelmed by proximity to violence and is now engaged in putting itself back together. It's not just alcoholism she's in recovery from, but her ability not to know what is happening to her. When she gives up the booze she comes face to face with herself again. Paula works as a cleaner. Dirt, according to Freud, is matter in the wrong place, while for Jung a ghost is memory in the wrong time. Halfway through the novel, while scraping ice from someone else's freezer, Paula reflects on her inability to care for her children in time: "Her children are all around her, all their different ages and faces. She has divided into thousands." It's a moment when the dirt meets the ghosts. On the brink of being overwhelmed, she asks "What happened?" (to her daughter) and then "What happens?" (when we fail our children). Immediately the thought arises, prompted by voices on the radio: "The McCartney murder won't go away. Paula knows all about it now. She's seen the pictures of the pub where it started. She's seen the lane beside the pub where he was killed." That religion is as culpable as alcohol is evidenced by the chilling detail, provided by the McCartney sisters on the radio, that a "Padre Pio" is a bullet in the hand. At the heart of this novel is failed parenting and its national implications. If there is no cathartic moment in which the abuser is driven from the house, it's because it is the hardwiring she is up against now: the child who copies the drinking, and the violent grown-up with whom she has to come to terms. Moments of catharsis are to be found in the almost imperceptible shifts of understanding between two people - as when Paula's self image is restored by her lost son, a former heroin addict: "But think about it. If you were running away you wouldn't actually be running. You'd have stopped." Walter Benjamin says that you learn more about a civilisation from its rubbish than from its great architecture. Paula operates among the other mothers of the displaced, the African women cleaners who have to put their families on hold. If the old pains in her body are the last kicks of the dead husband, the new ones are occasioned by the economic brutality of the modern republic. That she isn't overwhelmed by the task of integration is a tribute to her capacity to engage with the modern world, particularly its music. Doyle returns in this novel to his favourite theme of the transformational power of music, the domestic interiors shrinking after Paula's exposure to it: three coffee machines in a kitchen remind her of the cranes she sees every day from the Dart. This bird's-eye perspec tive confirms her mythic status, while her receptivity to what she calls the new "hard" music, such as the White Stripes, allows her to regain control of her distracted mind. Time is marked by time away from alcohol: one year and one day; 13 months and one week. Although it is never referred to, the novel ends on the eve of the IRA's historic decision to put its weapons beyond use: this is a country in recovery learning to be careful. Doyle joins a growing number of writers who are concerned with the need of the Irish nation to grow up, to mind the children, "all their ages and faces". When the mother country abdicates, it is the sisters who come to the fore - as have the sisters of Robert McCartney, an insistent presence in the book, and Paula's own sister. Recovering from a mastectomy, she adds a new text to this condition-of-Ireland novel when she sends Paula the message: "1 tit. Hpy Brthy." It celebrates that among the clod hoppers there are amazons. Anne Devlin's plays include Ourselves Alone and After Easter . To order Paula Spencer for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-Fiction 3.1 [Paula Spencer] works as a cleaner. Dirt, according to Freud, is matter in the wrong place, while for Jung a ghost is memory in the wrong time. Halfway through the novel, while scraping ice from someone else's freezer, Paula reflects on her inability to care for her children in time: "Her children are all around her, all their different ages and faces. She has divided into thousands." It's a moment when the dirt meets the ghosts. On the brink of being overwhelmed, she asks "What happened?" (to her daughter) and then "What happens?" (when we fail our children). Immediately the thought arises, prompted by voices on the radio: "The [Robert McCartney] murder won't go away. Paula knows all about it now. She's seen the pictures of the pub where it started. She's seen the lane beside the pub where he was killed." That religion is as culpable as alcohol is evidenced by the chilling detail, provided by the McCartney sisters on the radio, that a "Padre Pio" is a bullet in the hand. - Anne Devlin.
Kirkus Review
An intimate, humane portrait of a working-class Irish woman's pleasures and struggles in her first year of sobriety. Doyle fans first met Paula Spencer in Doyle's critically acclaimed novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), the story of Paula's alcoholism, her marriage to the wild, abusive Charlo and their four children. This book opens eight years later, on Paula's 47th birthday. Charlo is dead, two of Paula's children are grown and have children of their own and Paula is four months and five days sober. Some big things happen in this novel--fights, sickness, reconciliation--but they are not the story's focus. Instead, Doyle employs his trademark narrative style, an almost exclusive use of dialogue and fragmented inner monologue, to convey the thousand tiny moments of despair and triumph that make up Paula's daily life. To the middle- class observer, Paula lives a drab, working-class existence cleaning houses and stadiums in Dublin. But to be an ordinary person is a source of great joy to Paula. Like a woman who has returned from the verge of death, she can't get over her luck. That she has money in her pocket and the occasional day off from work, that she is able to savor good coffee in the Italian caf in her neighborhood where, she's pleased to note, they trust her not to run off without paying--all are sources of joy. "It's grand," Paula says. As she gradually builds a new life, it's a phrase she uses again and again. Profound, subtle and unsentimental--the latest from a master back in top form. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Doyle revisits Paula Spencer The Woman Who Walked into Doors now 48, widowed, barely sober, but on the mend. Online readers' guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
She copes. A lot of the time. Most of the time. She copes. And sometimes she doesn't. Cope. At all. This is one of the bad days. She could feel it coming. From the minute she woke up. One of those days. It hasn't let her down. She'll be forty-eight in a few weeks. She doesn't care about that. Not really. It's more than four months since she had a drink. Four months and five days. One of those months was February. That's why she started measuring the time in months. She could jump three days. But it's a leap year; she had to give one back. Four months, five days. A third of a year. Half a pregnancy, nearly. A long time. The drink is only one thing. She's on her way home from work. She's walking from the station. There's no energy in her. Nothing in her legs. Just pain. Ache. The thing the drink gets down to. But the drink is only part of it. She's coped well with the drink. She wants a drink. She doesn't want a drink. She doesn't want a drink. She fights it. She wins. She's proud of that. She's pleased. She'll keep going. She knows she will. But sometimes she wakes up, knowing the one thing. She's alone. She still has Jack. Paula wakes him every morning. He's a great sleeper. It's a long time now since he was up before her. She's proud of that too. She sits on his bed. She ruffles his hair. Ruffles -- that's the word. A head made for ruffling. Jack will break hearts. And she still has Leanne. Mad Leanne. Mad, funny. Mad, good. Mad, brainy. Mad, lovely -- and frightening. They're not small any more, not kids. Leanne is twenty-two. Jack is nearly sixteen. Leanne has boyfriends. Paula hasn't met any of them. Jack, she doesn't know about. He tells her nothing. He's been taller than her since he was twelve. She checks his clothes for girl-smells but all she can smell is Jack. He's still her baby. It's not a long walk from the station. It just feels that way tonight. God, she's tired. She's been tired all day. Tired and dark. This place has changed. She's not interested tonight. She just wants to get home. The ache is in her ankles. The ground is hard. Every footstep cracks her. Paula Spencer. That's who she is. She wants a drink. The house is empty. She can feel it before she shuts the door behind her. Bad. She needs the company. She needs distraction. They've left the lights on, and the telly. But she knows. She can feel it. The door is louder. Her bag drops like a brick. There's no one in. Get used to it, she tells herself. She's finished. That's how it often feels. She never looked forward to it. The freedom. The time. She doesn't want it. She isn't hungry. She never really is. She stands in front of the telly. Her coat is half off. It's one of those house programmes. She usually likes them. But not tonight. A couple looking around their new kitchen. They're delighted, opening all the presses. Fuck them. She turns away. But stops. Their fridge, on the telly. It's the same as Paula's. Mrs Happy opens it. And closes it. Smiling. Paula had hers before them. A present from Nicola. The fridge. And the telly. Both presents. Nicola is her eldest. Paula goes into the kitchen. The fridge is there. -You were on the telly, she says. She feels stupid. Talking to the fridge. She hated that film, Shirley Valentine , when Shirley talked to the wall. Hello, wall. She fuckin' hated it. It got better, the film, but that bit killed it for her. At her worst, her lowest, Paula never spoke to a wall or anything else that wasn't human. And now she's talking to the fridge. Sober, hard-working, reliable -- she's all these things these days, and she's talking to the fridge. It's a good fridge, though. It takes up half the kitchen. It's one of those big silver, two-door jobs. Ridiculous. Twenty years too late. She opens it the way film stars open the curtains. Daylight! Ta-dah! Empty. What was Nicola thinking of? The stupid bitch. How to make a poor woman feel poorer. Buy her a big fridge. Fill that, loser. The stupid bitch. What was she thinking? But that's not fair. She knows it's not. Nicola meant well; she always does. All the presents. She's showing off a bit. But that's fine with Paula. She's proud to have a daughter who can fling a bit of money around. The pride takes care of the humiliation, every time. Kills it stone dead. She's not hungry. But she'd like something to eat. Something nice. It shocked her, a while back -- not long ago. She was in Carmel, her sister's house. Chatting, just the pair of them that afternoon. Denise, her other sister, was away somewhere, doing something -- she can't remember. And Carmel took one of those Tesco prawn things out of her own big fridge and put it between them on the table. Paula took up a prawn and put it into her mouth -- and tasted it. -Lovely, she said. -Yeah, said Carmel. -They're great. Paula hadn't explained it to her. The fact that she was tasting, really tasting something for the first time in -- she didn't know how long. Years. She'd liked it. The feeling. And she'd liked the prawns. And other things she's eaten since. Tayto, cheese and onion. Coffee. Some tomatoes. Chicken skin. Smarties.She's tasted them all. But the fridge is fuckin' empty. She picks up the milk carton. She weighs it. Enough for the morning. She checks the date. It's grand; two days to go. There's a carrot at the bottom of the fridge. She bends down -- she likes raw carrots. Another new taste. But this one is old, and soft. She should bring it to the bin. She lets it drop back into the fridge. There's a jar of mayonnaise in there as well. Half empty. A bit yellow. Left over from last summer. There's a bit of red cheese, and a tub of Dairygold. There's a packet of waffles in the freezer. There's two left in the packet -- Jack's breakfast. There's something else in the back of the freezer, covered in ice, hidden. Stuck there. The package is red -- she can see that much. But she doesn't know what it is. She'd have to hack at it with a knife or something. She couldn't be bothered. Anyway, if it was worth eating it wouldn't be there. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
