Behind Closed Doors

Roddy Doyle, "The Women Behind the Door" (2024, 262 pp.)

Having reviewed two of Dubliner Roddy Doyle’s novels—The Commitments for the Voice in 1989 and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors for Spin in 1996, the latter of which I packed into my Book Reports collection—I was delighted to get his just-published The Women Behind the Door in the mail. But soon I was surprised to turn to its “By the Same Author” page and find 20 titles unfamiliar to me listed under “Fiction,” three under “Non-Fiction,” and eight more under “For Children”—and then even more surprised to poke around in my own records and learn that by 2006 I’d downed seven more Doyle novels, some of which I kind of recalled and some of which, obviously, I didn’t. The last of these was 2006’s Paula Spencer, the name of both the woman who walked into doors and now of one the women behind the door as well.

As I trust most readers have intuited, this walking into doors thing is supposed to function as transparent code for spousal abuse. It’s how Paula and her husband Charlo explained the bruises and worse he left on her body until she finally brained him with the frying pan his mother had given her—a suitable preamble to Charlo’s imminent death, shot down by the police during one of the robberies with which he supported himself and his family, though they were always augmented and once he was dead replaced by Paula’s long hours as a charwoman. But by the time of this new novel she’s 66 and leading a rather different life—her alcoholism under control, her her oldest and most successful daughter Nicola paired off with a much better man than Charlo, and her older son John Paul, once a heroin addict, now sober, though her favorite son Jack, now teaching college in Chicago, keeps his distance emotionally as well as physically. She has a moderately classy longtime boyfriend who enjoys how smart she is and a job she likes in a dry cleaning store via one of the claque of girlfriends she’s gathered around her, all of whom giggle through the rigmarole of getting vaxxed for Covid as the novel begins.

Before too long, however, cognitive dissonance makes its move—not everything is hunky-dory. The main reason is that Nicola has showed up on the doorstep of the house she grew up in, where for some as yet unarticulated reason she seems ready to move in. This development Paula addresses by taking her first long walk into town in what feels like years—a walk that comes to a halt when she first notices a dead seagull no one else seems even to see and shortly after that gets knocked to the ground by a young Roma or is it Brazilian immigrant on a Deliveroo bike. That incident stretches on for almost 20 pages—until page 99 of a 262-page book, to be precise—and ends with Paula finally coming to grips with the main reason she’d undertaken this trek to begin with, which is her daughter’s unexplained arrival. And for those remaining 163 pages Paula and Nicola are the women behind the door, feigning Covid so that they can have uninterrupted time to probe the scars and worse they’ve concealed not just from the friends and family members who care enough about them to keep checking in on them, but from each other and themselves.

It’s not as if this novel lacks flashbacks much less dispatches from the outside world—there’s a lot of texting from all over, sometimes just across town and sometimes from downstairs or behind closed doors. Nevertheless, you have my permission to look askance at a full-length novel two thirds of which comprises largely inconclusive interactions verbal and otherwise between a 66-year-old widow and her successful but depressed and irritable albeit hopefully only menopausal daughter. I did for a while. But before too long I’d changed my mind

The Doyle novels I’ve read tend to move along on the domestic ups and downs and ongoing badinage of lower-middle-class families whose wit and acuity and surprising details generally pack as much if not more substance and originality than the questing young culturati and unsettled older professionals who populate so much fiction of putative quality. The Woman Behind the Door is different. Absolutely Nicola and Paula both partake of the same kind of observant, thoughtful, witty intelligence we’ve seen often in Doyle. But the crisis that’s driven Nicola back to her mother’s house (a house the daughter remembers full well was also Charlo’s house once), while cut occasionally with homely domestic details and Irish wisecracking, is pretty grim by what I’ve experienced as Doyle’s usual standards—grimmer, in fact, including that odd but far from ominous interlude with the Deliveroo worker. And soon ensues a long, detailed, not always fully explicated narrative that’s essentially about a mother once again charged with seeing her daughter through the kind of crisis parents hope against hope will stop befalling their kids once they’ve weathered their teens—impenetrable silences and passive-aggressive deceptions from, in this case, the most accomplished of her children. It drags on and on, through phantom Covid symptoms and painful recollections of the abusive husband we begin to suspect was an even more abusive father although that possibility is scotched. Turns out the clincher that sent accomplished professional Nicola running back to mammy was a much milder but nevertheless ominous single phrase uttered by her teenaged brother-in-law at a family funeral. 

This family crisis is ongoing; in fact, it’s probably unlikely but not  impossible that Doyle can further excavate its details in a subsequent novel. But in the meantime what this skillful, entertaining novelist has done is take a formal leap and conceivably a professional risk. Though they have their lighter moments, these final 163 pages are pretty grim for a novelist who’s always kept an eye on the entertainment factor. They have the kind of grimness usually associated with literature in the highbrow sense. But for just that reason they feel even more substantial than most Doyle—they’re both meaty and at moments distressing. I personally would love to read a sequel.