OPINION:
SMILE
By Roddy Doyle
Viking, $26, 214 pages
“I’m an atheist. Strictly speaking, I don’t believe in anything.” That’s what Irish writer Roddy Doyle told an interviewer in 2011.
One doesn’t have to read very far into this novel to realize that Victor Forde, Mr. Doyle’s unhappy protagonist, doesn’t believe in much of anything, either. As he tells us in what may or may not be the words of a trustworthy narrator, Victor is — was — semi-famous throughout Ireland for two things.
The first was for being a frequent guest on radio and television talk shows where he said outrageous things about such national issues as abortion, the Catholic Church, and sexual abuse by the Christian Brothers. The second, and, as Victor tells it, a far more important thing for which he was semi-famous is that for several decades he was married to one of Ireland’s most beautiful and truly famous women, Rachel Carey.
Of his wife, Victor says, “When we met, we were neck and neck. We met outside a studio. I was on my way to becoming a successful man. I never became one. But she quickly became the woman who was famous for being successful and she has remained that woman.”
In Ireland, Victor explains, “You can get along for a long time before the truth starts to matter. ’You’re never off the telly.’ That was said to me years after the last time I’d been on television, and years after I’d stopped being a regular on Sunday-morning radio.
“Two appearances in close proximity make you a regular in Ireland — or, in Dublin. So my three or four panel performances got me there. I was famous for a book I was writing but didn’t write. I got away with that for three or four years. Then I was famous, but less famous, and far less interesting, for being a bit of a mouth. Rachel, though — Rachel was famous for her achievements. And for while — a short while — we were famous for being us.”
As the book opens, Victor and his still-famous wife are separated, and he’s just moved into a grim little apartment in a decidedly downscale neighborhood. Searching for a “local,” a neighborhood bar, to make his own, Victor settles on Donnelley’s where he is recognized by a man named Edward Fitzpatrick who claims they were classmates in secondary school (what Americans call high school).
Victor doesn’t actually recognize or like this man, but he can’t shake him, and so has to endure it as Fitzpatrick keeps bringing up unwelcome bits of Victor’s past. Chief among these bad memories is that one of the Christian Brothers liked Victor and made a comment in class that proved it. This, of course, made the rest of the boys label Victor a “queer.” Apparently, he wasn’t, but that made no difference to them, “mates” as well as non-mates, and for several years they tormented him ruthlessly, as only boys that age can do.
But the torments of his classmates were nothing compared to the pervasive potential of abuse, both physical and sexual, created by the “Brothers,” as Mr. Doyle calls them throughout “Smile.” In 2009, a study was released in Ireland that documented these claims and established a body that made payments to many of these abused boys.
However, as much as that historical fact is always in the background, it is not what Mr. Doyle dwells on in this novel. He’s far more interested in showing — through the plot device of Edward Fitzpatrick — how it made Victor Forde the type of person who could let true happiness slip through his fingers.
A two-time Man Booker Prize winner (for “The Van” in 1991 and again two years later for “Paddy Clarke Ha, Ha, Ha”) Roddy Doyle has written 14 works of fiction, one non-fiction book, seven plays, and eight books for children, and in many of these, Mr. Doyle is quite funny. But not in “Smile.”
Here he is too busy telling us where and how Victor’s life went off the tracks on the journey to deserved fame. Mr. Doyle could also be writing about his very real native Ireland, and the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, rather than about a fictional character named Victor Forde, because so much of what Victor specifies as the causes of his fate could also be ascribed to the country itself in recent decades.
In the final — and in my opinion — odd chapter, Mr. Doyle drifts into a kind of Irish magical realism that undercuts the interesting — and enjoyable — fictional narrative that has gone before. And in that reading, “Smile” becomes a dark and unsettling tale.
But then again, maybe this fine Irish writer is just having his way with us, the way the lads do, down at Donnelley’s each night, don’cha know.
• John Greenya is a Washington-area writer.
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