The Woman Who Walked into Doors

by Roddy Doyle

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The Woman Who Walked into Doors

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Just as the comic quality of Roddy Doyle’s first three novels—his Barrytown trilogy—did not prepare readers for the unrelieved grimness of PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA, winner of the 1993 Booker Prize, neither do the devastating but nevertheless relatively small-scale cruelties of the latter quite prepare readers for the pervasive despair and domestic violence recounted in Doyle’s latest (and best) novel. For all its gritty details of life among Dublin’s underclass, THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS goes well beyond documentary realism to create a sense of tragic inevitability in a culture insidiously bent on reproducing its worst features. A “sucker for romance,” Paula O’Leary discovers just how limited her future is as soon as she enters technical high school, where she is typecast academically and reduced to choosing between two sexual roles, slut or tight bitch. Not surprisingly, Paula gravitates toward an “elegant” young thug named Charlo Spencer who offers her the relative protection of “respectability.” Soon after they wed, Paula becomes pregnant and Charlo begins first to neglect, then to abuse her. To make matters worse, Charlo is aided and abetted by Paula’s culturally induced sense of guilt and worthlessness and a medical community all too willing to blame Paula for her injuries.

A simple rendering of Paula’s life would make compelling, albeit horrific, reading, but what makes her story, and Doyle’s novel, so affecting derives as much from the manner in which it is told. Paula contends, in typically self-lacerating fashion, that “It’s all a mess—there’s no order or sequence.” True enough, but her narrative actually gains power from its apparent shapelessness, guilt-ridden confession merging with self-therapy, her act of recovery eventually erupting into accusation and a litany of abuse suffered and damage done.

There are, however, limits to what Paula is willing or, after all the beatings, drinking, and Valium, even able to remember. Her story ends in a triumph of sorts, in her having (as she puts it) “done something good” in finally throwing Charlo out. Yet it is a triumph complicated not only be the extent of the physical and psychological damage (and not just to Paula, who has “lost all of my friends and most of my teeth”) but by uncertainty. As Nicola, the eldest of her children says then, two years before Paula begins telling her survivor’s tale (presumably to herself) and one before Charlo is killed by police after killing a woman in a botched kidnapping, “What now?”

Sources for Further Study

Chicago Tribune. April 14, 1996, XIV, p. 3.

Commonweal. CXXIII, October 11, 1996, p. 21.

Library Journal. CXXI, February 15, 1996, p. 174.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 5, 1996, p. 3.

New Statesman and Society. IX, May 3, 1996, p. 41.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, April 28, 1996, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, January 22, 1996, p. 57.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, March 25, 1996, p. 55.

The Spectator. CCLXXVI, March 30, 1996, p. 27.

The Times Literary Supplement. April 12, 1996, p. 24.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVI, April 7, 1996, p. 1.

World Press Review. XLIII, July, 1996, p. 37.

The Woman Who Walked into Doors

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In the three novels which make up Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy—The Commitments (1987), The Snapper (1990), and The Van (1991)—straitened lives are tempered by humor as the author allows the limited aspirations of his characters, the members of the Rabbitte family in particular, to rise, however briefly, even absurdly, over the still more limiting circumstances of their North Dublin working-class existence. Doyle’s Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) is also set in Barrytown but tells an altogether grimmer story tempered not by humor this time but by the author’s filtering his story through the mind of its ten- year-old protagonist, creating in...

(This entire section contains 2179 words.)

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effect an underclass version of Henry James’sWhat Maisie Knew (1897) or the early sections of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1915).

Where the earlier novels were fast-paced, lightened by lots of snappy dialogue (and in The Commitments blues lyrics), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha turns inward to reveal what it is like to be a boy in such a world where hope is nonexistent and cruelty and violence, in the home no less than in the school and on the street, both casual and escalating. The sensitivity with which Paddy sees his world contrasts sharply with how little he is able or (in the case of his parents’ fighting) willing to understand, especially when understanding will only delay the inevitable hardening of character that seems to be his sole defense against Barrytown and all it represents.

The Woman Who Walked into Doors takes the inward, downward swerve deeper still. This slice of Dublin life will not inspire any Bloomsday tours of the city, as Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) has. Nor is it quite the Irish equivalent of Albert Square, the fictional and less menacingly claustrophobic setting of the popular English television series East Enders. In situating his novel so precisely and grittily, Doyle creates a sense of horrific familiarity, a “dirty realism” which he combines with a strangely poeticized, almost incantatory sense of tragic inevitability that is at once classical, naturalistic, and post-Joycean if not quite postmodern, far leaner and more elegantly crafted than, say, Frank Norris’ melodramatic McTeague (1898) or Theodore Dreiser’s ponderous An American Tragedy (1926). Character is not fate in Doyle’s fiction; family is, and family circumstances. This is not the Darwinian “heredity” and “environment” one finds in the Rougon-Macquart novels of the late nineteenth century French naturalist Émile Zola. It is instead something which, while no less insidiously deterministic, appears more culturally pervasive and thus less amenable to an earlier faith either in naturalism’s pseudoscientific documentary style or Stephen Dedalus’ grandiose ambition to awake from the nightmare of history and “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

The possibilities for sons are, as Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha shows, rather more limited and limiting. The options for daughters, as The Woman Who Walked into Doors demonstrates, are even more constricting, partly because they offer the illusion of choice (and the shame and guilt that go with making the wrong choice). A daughter can become a “sucker for romance,” as the narrator, Paula, does, or, like her older sister Carmel, “a hard b——.” (There is a third option: younger sister Wendy dies in a motorbike accident.) In grammar school, Paula’s storytelling earns her the approval she craves and fuels her short-lived ambition to become a teacher. Yet her years at the technical high school, where she is relegated to the next- to-lowest group, make her “rough.” (Doyle, himself a former teacher, makes clear the role such schools play in perpetuating social stereotypes and class distinctions rather than addressing and remedying social ills.) Paula’s options are now more starkly apparent and sexual: “slut” or “tight b——”; vulnerable (despite her hard surface) and still “a sucker for romance,” she gravitates toward the “elegant” eighteen-year-old Charles “Charlo” Spencer, a former skinhead with a criminal record. “I was Charlo’s girl now and that made me respectable.” He is king and she, not quite queen or princess, “but someone. It was a start”—an inauspicious one at best.

Indeed everything about her early relations with Charlo point to the kind of life she will have. There is her initial mistake in correctly pointing out to him that he had been held in a juvenile hall, not a “real” (adult) prison (a small and entirely inadvertent blow to Charlo’s precarious machismo), followed by their first sex “on the field when we were drunk, especially me, and I didn’t really know what was happening, only his weight and wanting to get sick; I felt terrible after it, scared and soggy, guilty and sore.” Paula passes her wedding night alone while Charlo is off drinking with his brothers; their honeymoon is a week-long stay at a bed and breakfast. Soon after, Paula becomes pregnant and her situation worsens because she could not give Charlo “what he wanted, a pregnant wife who wasn’t really pregnant,” a wife able to serve as the outward and visible sign of his virility while continuing to provide, in bed, more frequent and less public proof of his unflagging manhood. As a result, Charlo begins having affairs with other women just when Paula feels least attractive and most vulnerable. When she bitterly tells him one night to make his own tea, he strikes her, thereby inaugurating a seventeen-year period of increasingly violent physical (including sexual) abuse.

“You never get used to it,” she deadpans, but she also never leaves, in part because of his occasional, trifling kindnesses (making her a cup of tea, leaving a favorite candy for her to find), in part because of the way he controls and intimidates her (accompanying her to the hospital, always staying by her side; turning his game of hide-and-seek with the candy into a more ambiguous and psychologically damaging game of cat-and- mouse), in part because of her children (“I was their future”), and in part out of guilt. (Along with the preoccupation with “family,” no matter how dysfunctional, and the absence of birth control, guilt is the chief way in which the otherwise absent Catholic church manifests itself in the novel and in Paula’s life). Greater (abject) love hath no woman than that which this woman scorned, and worse, has for Charlo. She stays, even stands by her man “To prove to him. That I was worth it, worth loving,” as she puts it in her painfully staccato, self-excoriating way. It is not until Paula sees, or thinks she sees, Charlo staring at their teenage daughter Nicola one morning that she finally acts. Seeing that look, not of lust (as the reader at first assumes) but of hatred, Paula does for her daughter’s sake what she has been unable to do for herself (any more than her own mother had been able to for her years before). She strikes him on the head, driving him first to his knees, then from the house.

In telling the tale of how a sucker for romance became the woman who walked into doors (one of the many lame excuses she had used to explain her injuries) and then “the woman whose husband was shot” (after Charlo was killed by police during a botched kidnapping) and finally, one year later, “me now,” Paula picks up where she left off as a schoolgirl, telling stories. Her telling by turns discloses but also disguises as well as discovers, using available facts and necessary conjectures to fill in the gaps both in her own life and in Charlo’s, especially the period just before he shot and killed his hostage, Gertrude Fleming, the woman who, as the postmortem report laconically puts it, “had been struck twice across the face.” Paula begins her narrative with her learning of Charlo’s death: news which triggers as it were the rest of her literally painful story. There is a second trigger, the 1970’s music Paula listens to while working, cleaning someone else’s house; the songs evoke memories, a process which accounts in part for her story’s shape, its untidy structure. “It’s all a mess—there’s no order or sequence. I have dates, a beginning and an end, but the years in between won’t fall into place.” Paula’s story is only as simple—Charlo lost his temper and hit her; “It was as simple as that”—as it is “complicated,” only as “stupid” as it is “terrible.”

Her simple, seemingly artless telling is similarly complicated both by psychological and physiological factors: by how much Paula is willing to remember and how much, after all the beatings, drinking, and Valium she is able to remember. Explanation becomes mixed with expiation—the guilt she feels over her children, Mrs. Fleming, even Charlo. Her desire to reveal is inextricably and understandably tied to her desire to delay, to put off as long as possible the pain of narrating, remembering, acknowledging Charlo’s first blow, of his and Mrs. Fleming’s deaths, and, what takes longest of all, of seeing what was in Charlo’s eyes when he looked at Nicola. As a result, she ends up doing narratively what she formerly did in order to make bearable the physical pain of Charlo’s blows, spreading it out to the rest of her body. Her telling also serves as self- therapy—a secular version of confession and an alternative to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings she does not attend, does not even know where they are held. “I am an alcoholic. I’ve never admitted it to anyone. (No one would want to know.)” It also serves as accusation, or as much a one as the guilt-ridden Paula can muster. Writing for, talking to, herself allows her finally to give voice to the story she has kept bottled up for so long, the story Charlo did not want told and that others did not want to hear, neither the doctors nor the nurses who were either too busy to care or more than willing to see her as the guilty party, her injuries the result of her drinking rather than other way round. Thus the refrain that had been her silent prayer, “Ask me. Ask me. Ask me,” which finally releases a torrent of abuse suffered, a litany of damage done, too long to quote here and, even out of context, almost too painful to read.

Paula ends her narrative on a more or less triumphant note. “I’d done something good,” she says, thinking back to that time, two years earlier, when she threw Charlo out. Yet her triumph is more complicated than that, as her need to play the scene twice, almost verbatim, in the space of just three pages clearly suggests. It is complicated, too, by the fact that Paula’s simple declaration is offered in the narrative present as if in answer to the question Nicola posed two years earlier, “What now?” Paula’s “small, good thing” (as Raymond Carver might have called it) is complicated most by all that has happened in those two intervening years. There are the “little victories” of getting up, drinking less, working long hours for low pay, plus any romance novels she salvages from the trash: “I knew it was sh——, but I loved it.” Then there are the deaths of Charlo and Mrs. Fleming, and, most troublingly, there are the children: Nicola, now eighteen, who has a job and a boyfriend (of whom Paula approves, whatever that may mean); John Paul, at sixteen already a drug addict, present whereabouts unknown, a chip off the old paternal block; Leanne, twelve, who will be the first Spencer or O’Leary to finish school (then college, “a real one”), as Paula can still dream, or fantasize; and Jack, her favorite, who at five still wears diapers and drinks from a bottle.

The story of this woman who “lost all of my friends and most of my teeth” is not, as the jacket copy perversely claims, “Lean and sexy, funny and poignant.” (The sex is sadomasochistic and the humor decidedly self-lacerating.) The Woman Who Walked into Doors is a harrowing novel, yet oddly elevating too, in terms of both Doyle’s self-effacing artistry and Paula’s complicated determination. Like Doyle’s controversial 1994 television series Family (also about domestic violence and alcohol abuse), it offers further proof, should any still be needed, that much of the finest fiction being written in the 1990’s comes from the Ireland of Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe and the Scotland of James Kelman and Janice Galloway.

Sources for Further Study

Chicago Tribune. April 14, 1996, XIV, p. 3.

Commonweal. CXXIII, October 11, 1996, p. 21.

Library Journal. CXXI, February 15, 1996, p. 174.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 5, 1996, p. 3.

New Statesman and Society. IX, May 3, 1996, p. 41.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, April 28, 1996, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, January 22, 1996, p. 57.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, March 25, 1996, p. 55.

The Spectator. CCLXXVI, March 30, 1996, p. 27.

The Times Literary Supplement. April 12, 1996, p. 24.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVI, April 7, 1996, p. 1.

World Press Review. XLIII, July, 1996, p. 37.

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