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Smile: A Novel
From the author of the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a bold, haunting novel about the uncertainty of memory and how we contend with the past.
"It's his bravest novel yet; it's also, by far, his best." -- npr.org
“The closest thing he’s written to a psychological thriller."– The New York Times Book Review
Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt comes over and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick.
Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes, too, the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories—of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who would say the unsayable on the radio. But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular brother, that Victor cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.
Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become the razor-sharp dialogue, the humor, the superb evocation of adolescence, but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to reevaluate everything you think you remember so clearly.
"It's his bravest novel yet; it's also, by far, his best." -- npr.org
“The closest thing he’s written to a psychological thriller."– The New York Times Book Review
Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt comes over and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick.
Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes, too, the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories—of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who would say the unsayable on the radio. But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular brother, that Victor cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.
Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become the razor-sharp dialogue, the humor, the superb evocation of adolescence, but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to reevaluate everything you think you remember so clearly.
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 7, 2017
395 people are currently reading
4658 people want to read
About the author
Roddy Doyle
127 books1,646 followersRoddy Doyle (Irish: Ruaidhrí Ó Dúill) is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into successful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. He won the Booker Prize in 1993.
Doyle grew up in Kilbarrack, Dublin. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from University College, Dublin. He spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer in 1993.
Doyle grew up in Kilbarrack, Dublin. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from University College, Dublin. He spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer in 1993.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 654 reviews
December 2, 2019
I'm not sure that anyone writes poor, scrappy white kids like Roddy Doyle.
And, Jaysus, can this man summon Voice.
Almost no living writer today writes dialogue better than Doyle, and the back streets we've journeyed together. . . the cobbled and the whole. . . have conglomerated in my mind like one long love song for the broken boys of Ireland.
But, this one. This one broke my fucking heart.
I'm not playing around here. If you're old enough to remember when The Crying Game came out and how shocked the audience was by the ending, then you will have an idea how I felt last night, as I arrived at the last twenty pages of this novel.
The endings of these two stories are not at all the same; they're only similar in their ability to toss you out on your ear and kick your ass on the way down to the ground. I lay inert on my bed for almost a full hour after finishing this read, wondering why Roddy Doyle had to do this to me, and I awakened to the answered question: He wants the world to know what sexual abuse can do to people.
I've never been happier with my childhood than I am at this moment. It wasn't perfect, and my innocence was threatened probably as many times as yours was, but I see now that my sexuality was allowed to develop without religious fanaticism and without abuse. That should be a given for all people, but we know that, sadly, it's not.
I wish I could collect all the broken bits of these beautiful boys and make them whole again, but I can't.
I can, however, recommend Doyle's writing, but I'm not sure I can press this book into your hands without a grimace on my face.
Can I even recommend being human?
If reincarnation is real, put in your request right now to come back as a rat.
I hear the sewers are lovely this time of year.
And, Jaysus, can this man summon Voice.
Almost no living writer today writes dialogue better than Doyle, and the back streets we've journeyed together. . . the cobbled and the whole. . . have conglomerated in my mind like one long love song for the broken boys of Ireland.
But, this one. This one broke my fucking heart.
I'm not playing around here. If you're old enough to remember when The Crying Game came out and how shocked the audience was by the ending, then you will have an idea how I felt last night, as I arrived at the last twenty pages of this novel.
The endings of these two stories are not at all the same; they're only similar in their ability to toss you out on your ear and kick your ass on the way down to the ground. I lay inert on my bed for almost a full hour after finishing this read, wondering why Roddy Doyle had to do this to me, and I awakened to the answered question: He wants the world to know what sexual abuse can do to people.
I've never been happier with my childhood than I am at this moment. It wasn't perfect, and my innocence was threatened probably as many times as yours was, but I see now that my sexuality was allowed to develop without religious fanaticism and without abuse. That should be a given for all people, but we know that, sadly, it's not.
I wish I could collect all the broken bits of these beautiful boys and make them whole again, but I can't.
I can, however, recommend Doyle's writing, but I'm not sure I can press this book into your hands without a grimace on my face.
Can I even recommend being human?
If reincarnation is real, put in your request right now to come back as a rat.
I hear the sewers are lovely this time of year.
September 17, 2017
(Contains spoilers)
As soon as you reach the end of Roddy Doyle’s extraordinary novel, ‘Smile’, you’re tempted to go back and read it straight through again to work out whether you should have anticipated the narrative trick Doyle has just pulled and whether or not the whole thing actually works.
I have done just that and I have to admit I’m not entirely convinced that it does – I’m still baffled, and I’m still worried that in ‘Smile’ the great Roddy Doyle might have, literally and metaphorically, and perhaps deliberately, lost the plot.
‘Smile’ is narrated by fiftysomething Victor Forde. He tells us how he dropped out of University to write music reviews, became an outspoken radio star, married Rachel, a TV celebrity, and started a book on the ills of Ireland that he never got round to finishing. Now, separated from Rachel, he has moved into an apartment block and started to frequent Donnelly’s, determined to make the pub his local. One evening a man called Fitzpatrick walks in and approaches Victor, telling him that he had been his contemporary at school. Victor can’t remember Fitzpatrick, can’t quite place him, but he continues to see a good deal more of him in Donnelly’s over the coming weeks as he provokes memories of his schooldays and one memory in particular – the abuse he experienced at the hands of The Christian Brothers.
All the great Doyle stuff is here – childhood memories, working class communities, the minutiae of popular culture, the rhythms of everyday speech, the bawdy irreverence for church and country, the realism, and, of course, the humour. As with so many other Doyle works, though, below the surface, below the apparent simplicity and directness of the prose, below the humour, there’s an underlying, and troubling, darkness. In ‘Smile’ this darkness is the horrifying, haunting darkness of abuse.
There is, though, another kind of darkness haunting the pages of ‘Smile’. This one casts perturbing shadows not over the narrator’s present life and troubled past, but over the reader’s present experience. It’s a darkness that clouds our sense of any narrative certainty, that muddies fiction’s claim to embody or reflect any kind of truth.
Two elements of the novel create this shadow. One is the way Doyle uses Victor as a writer. Throughout the book we are constantly reminded of the narrator’s acts of creation. Fitzpatrick says to him ‘You creative types – fuckin’ writers. You must always be working on some fuckin’ book – I’d say, are yis?’ The answer to his question is that that, yes, Victor is writing a book. It takes us some time, though, to realise that the book he is writing in the novel happens to be the one we are reading.
How do we know this?
On page 139 we have this - ‘I sat at the table and wrote. She pulled me to the floor by the sleeve of my jumper.Then she kneeled in front of me – she wasn’t smiling. She turned her back and dropped onto her elbows’.
The careful first reader, or the lazy second-time reader, will find this familiar, because on page 102 they will have read - ‘She pulled me to the floor by the sleeve of my jumper.Then she kneeled in front of me – she wasn’t smiling. She turned her back and dropped onto her elbows’.
We are thus encouraged to see the novel as something that Victor himself was, at some time in the past, writing. We are also, though, encouraged to see it as something he is still creating. Take this, for example - ‘She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I look at that sentence and I hate it’. Here the present tense writer is being critical of the sentence he has just written, It is not unusual to have a present tense narrator who is writing the novel we are reading and describing past events, a narrator who steps in every now and then to remind us of the fact (think of Nick Carraway in ‘The Great Gatsby’ for example) but Doyle’s method is unusual and confusing. By having Victor writing the novel both in the past and in the present he makes it all very puzzling - we’re in danger of disappearing down a hall of metafictional mirrors, or, as Doyle would probably put it, up a similarly dark orifice.
The other question to ask about Victor is whether we can trust him. ‘If I’m being honest,’ he says at one point, immediately qualifying it with ‘ – and I’m still not sure I am.’ The words ‘unreliable narrator’ flash out of the phrase in glowing neon and by the end of the novel we are asking big questions, not only of some strange gaps and silences (why, for example, are we told so little about his son?), but also of some oddities of tone and emphasis (why, for example, does he present his relationship with Rachel, in particular his sexual relationship with her, as such a raging success?) Is Victor’s memory, like all our memories, fallible and partial, or has something else been going on?
The other confusing and complicating element undermining the novel’s claim to ‘realism’ or ‘truth’ is the characterisation of Fitzpatrick. Look at the following descriptions of him:
‘I couldn’t see a younger version of this man. I didn’t like him. I knew that immediately’
‘I hated this man, whoever he was’ ‘there was something about him – an expression, a rhythm – that’s recognised and welcomed’,
‘I didn’t like him but I wanted to remember him. I wanted that bridge’
'Fitzgerald was lurking somewhere…I suspected Fitzgerald disappeared for spells.’
‘I wondered why I wasn’t like him – or if I could have been like him. How would I have been, who would I have been, if I’d stayed?’
‘I tried to remember his father’s funeral. But all I could recall was my own experience’
The clues about Fitzpatrick are laid on thick but you don't (or at least I didn't) notice them at first, and it is only when you reach the end that you realise the exact nature of the odd relationship between the two men.
‘Smile’ is about regret, memory, guilt, and the horror of abuse. At its heart lies a sense, of, as Fitzpatrick puts it, ‘what your life would’ve been like if it had been a bit different…’. It’s about having a dose of ‘what-ifs’. The problem, though, is that Roddy Doyle may have taken a fictional ‘what-if’ premise and stretched it too far, causing the novel’s whole house of cards to come close to tumbling down at the end in a trick that’s gone wrong.
On the other hand, Doyle could be in complete control, and this final card-collapsing effect could be intentional, the provocative finale undermining any sense of ‘realism’ (the quality for which, over the years, he has been rightly lauded) and making us question the ‘truth’ of all that we have read. What, in fact, have we been reading? What, exactly, has the narrator been telling us? Are we to dismiss all of it as unbelievable? Are we to fear for the narrator’s sanity? Are we to see the whole thing as some clever post-modern trick , a literary rug-pull that leaves us floored but full of admiration?
Perhaps in this novel about suppressed and fallible memory it is appropriate that the 'truth' should be problematised in this way. Perhaps in a novel about duality ( a kind of 'Jekyll and Hyde Ha Ha Ha) it is appropriate that Doyle should pull his final narrative stunt. And perhaps in this novel about abuse it is appropriate that the reader should close the book feeling unsettled - compelled, like me, to revisit it, to go over it again, to relive it and try to make sense of it all.
It could be that Doyle has simply lost the plot. Or it could be that his character, Victor Forde, has lost the plot, tortured by the memories of abuse at the Christian Brothers school, and condemned to write a novel which, like his book on Ireland, he will never finish. 'I was crying,' he says at the end of the novel, ' I couldn't stop crying.' His final words , though, are in the present tense. 'And I can't stop,' he says, suggesting that for him there will be no comfort provided by any trite sense of closure.
As soon as you reach the end of Roddy Doyle’s extraordinary novel, ‘Smile’, you’re tempted to go back and read it straight through again to work out whether you should have anticipated the narrative trick Doyle has just pulled and whether or not the whole thing actually works.
I have done just that and I have to admit I’m not entirely convinced that it does – I’m still baffled, and I’m still worried that in ‘Smile’ the great Roddy Doyle might have, literally and metaphorically, and perhaps deliberately, lost the plot.
‘Smile’ is narrated by fiftysomething Victor Forde. He tells us how he dropped out of University to write music reviews, became an outspoken radio star, married Rachel, a TV celebrity, and started a book on the ills of Ireland that he never got round to finishing. Now, separated from Rachel, he has moved into an apartment block and started to frequent Donnelly’s, determined to make the pub his local. One evening a man called Fitzpatrick walks in and approaches Victor, telling him that he had been his contemporary at school. Victor can’t remember Fitzpatrick, can’t quite place him, but he continues to see a good deal more of him in Donnelly’s over the coming weeks as he provokes memories of his schooldays and one memory in particular – the abuse he experienced at the hands of The Christian Brothers.
All the great Doyle stuff is here – childhood memories, working class communities, the minutiae of popular culture, the rhythms of everyday speech, the bawdy irreverence for church and country, the realism, and, of course, the humour. As with so many other Doyle works, though, below the surface, below the apparent simplicity and directness of the prose, below the humour, there’s an underlying, and troubling, darkness. In ‘Smile’ this darkness is the horrifying, haunting darkness of abuse.
There is, though, another kind of darkness haunting the pages of ‘Smile’. This one casts perturbing shadows not over the narrator’s present life and troubled past, but over the reader’s present experience. It’s a darkness that clouds our sense of any narrative certainty, that muddies fiction’s claim to embody or reflect any kind of truth.
Two elements of the novel create this shadow. One is the way Doyle uses Victor as a writer. Throughout the book we are constantly reminded of the narrator’s acts of creation. Fitzpatrick says to him ‘You creative types – fuckin’ writers. You must always be working on some fuckin’ book – I’d say, are yis?’ The answer to his question is that that, yes, Victor is writing a book. It takes us some time, though, to realise that the book he is writing in the novel happens to be the one we are reading.
How do we know this?
On page 139 we have this - ‘I sat at the table and wrote. She pulled me to the floor by the sleeve of my jumper.Then she kneeled in front of me – she wasn’t smiling. She turned her back and dropped onto her elbows’.
The careful first reader, or the lazy second-time reader, will find this familiar, because on page 102 they will have read - ‘She pulled me to the floor by the sleeve of my jumper.Then she kneeled in front of me – she wasn’t smiling. She turned her back and dropped onto her elbows’.
We are thus encouraged to see the novel as something that Victor himself was, at some time in the past, writing. We are also, though, encouraged to see it as something he is still creating. Take this, for example - ‘She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I look at that sentence and I hate it’. Here the present tense writer is being critical of the sentence he has just written, It is not unusual to have a present tense narrator who is writing the novel we are reading and describing past events, a narrator who steps in every now and then to remind us of the fact (think of Nick Carraway in ‘The Great Gatsby’ for example) but Doyle’s method is unusual and confusing. By having Victor writing the novel both in the past and in the present he makes it all very puzzling - we’re in danger of disappearing down a hall of metafictional mirrors, or, as Doyle would probably put it, up a similarly dark orifice.
The other question to ask about Victor is whether we can trust him. ‘If I’m being honest,’ he says at one point, immediately qualifying it with ‘ – and I’m still not sure I am.’ The words ‘unreliable narrator’ flash out of the phrase in glowing neon and by the end of the novel we are asking big questions, not only of some strange gaps and silences (why, for example, are we told so little about his son?), but also of some oddities of tone and emphasis (why, for example, does he present his relationship with Rachel, in particular his sexual relationship with her, as such a raging success?) Is Victor’s memory, like all our memories, fallible and partial, or has something else been going on?
The other confusing and complicating element undermining the novel’s claim to ‘realism’ or ‘truth’ is the characterisation of Fitzpatrick. Look at the following descriptions of him:
‘I couldn’t see a younger version of this man. I didn’t like him. I knew that immediately’
‘I hated this man, whoever he was’ ‘there was something about him – an expression, a rhythm – that’s recognised and welcomed’,
‘I didn’t like him but I wanted to remember him. I wanted that bridge’
'Fitzgerald was lurking somewhere…I suspected Fitzgerald disappeared for spells.’
‘I wondered why I wasn’t like him – or if I could have been like him. How would I have been, who would I have been, if I’d stayed?’
‘I tried to remember his father’s funeral. But all I could recall was my own experience’
The clues about Fitzpatrick are laid on thick but you don't (or at least I didn't) notice them at first, and it is only when you reach the end that you realise the exact nature of the odd relationship between the two men.
‘Smile’ is about regret, memory, guilt, and the horror of abuse. At its heart lies a sense, of, as Fitzpatrick puts it, ‘what your life would’ve been like if it had been a bit different…’. It’s about having a dose of ‘what-ifs’. The problem, though, is that Roddy Doyle may have taken a fictional ‘what-if’ premise and stretched it too far, causing the novel’s whole house of cards to come close to tumbling down at the end in a trick that’s gone wrong.
On the other hand, Doyle could be in complete control, and this final card-collapsing effect could be intentional, the provocative finale undermining any sense of ‘realism’ (the quality for which, over the years, he has been rightly lauded) and making us question the ‘truth’ of all that we have read. What, in fact, have we been reading? What, exactly, has the narrator been telling us? Are we to dismiss all of it as unbelievable? Are we to fear for the narrator’s sanity? Are we to see the whole thing as some clever post-modern trick , a literary rug-pull that leaves us floored but full of admiration?
Perhaps in this novel about suppressed and fallible memory it is appropriate that the 'truth' should be problematised in this way. Perhaps in a novel about duality ( a kind of 'Jekyll and Hyde Ha Ha Ha) it is appropriate that Doyle should pull his final narrative stunt. And perhaps in this novel about abuse it is appropriate that the reader should close the book feeling unsettled - compelled, like me, to revisit it, to go over it again, to relive it and try to make sense of it all.
It could be that Doyle has simply lost the plot. Or it could be that his character, Victor Forde, has lost the plot, tortured by the memories of abuse at the Christian Brothers school, and condemned to write a novel which, like his book on Ireland, he will never finish. 'I was crying,' he says at the end of the novel, ' I couldn't stop crying.' His final words , though, are in the present tense. 'And I can't stop,' he says, suggesting that for him there will be no comfort provided by any trite sense of closure.
October 15, 2017
3+ stars. Roddy Doyle has been around for a long time. I had read some of his earlier novels and not much since. I've never been to Ireland but always feel that he captures the sensibility of his country. I liked Smile for that reason. But I didn't love it. It's an oddly almost dreamy short novel told from the perspective of first person narrator Victor. Victor's story jumps around in time. He tells the story from his 54 year old perspective, now finding himself alone, with only pub mates as his friends and not having written the book he'd meant to write. His back story slowly gets filled in and includes school days spent at a Christian Brothers school, a quiet but loving relationship with his mum and a now defunct but previously intense relationship with celebrity chef Rachel. There's a pervasive sadness to Victor's story. There's also a foreboding edge in the form of a former schoolmate who seems to haunt Victor at the pub. The end is surprising and somehow not surprising, and it ends up turning the story on its head. Doyle creates a strong sense of time and place that I really appreciate. His portrayal of Victor's time in the boys' school is particularly vivid. But there was something missing or a bit too slapdash about how the story was put together. It felt like it could have been better. Not bad, but not great. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.
November 19, 2024
Well, I never saw that coming. That's a twist - well done Roddy Doyle. This is why I enjoy your books - that, and how fecking Irish they are, how Dublin they are, and your dialogue. Nobody does Dublin-esque dialogue like Roddy Doyle.
Victor Forde is fifty-four, and has been asked to leave his house by his wife. He moves back to the neighborhood of his childhood. He starts going to the local pub for a couple of pints in the evening. And there he is cornered by a man, Fitzpatrick, who claims he went to school with him - but Victor can't remember him. But Fitzpatrick seems to know a lot about his school years. Victor certainly doesn't like him, but he is aways around on the periphery of his day to day activities.
So the novel is a slow reveal, it flashes back through Victor's life - the Christian Brothers run school (memories of one particular Brother - who couldn't keep his hands to himself), how he met his beautiful and successful wife (although they never got around to getting married), his career in journalism and writing. And it is cleverly crafted. There are layers of information, and there are gaps - some gaps are filled in due course, others are not. Then, there is the ending.
It has been a while since I have ready a Roddy Doyle novel. Too long, and this one was excellent, although it is sad and dark, (and deals with some sexual abuse, so consider that if that is triggering for you as a reader). As another reviewer put it, you don't realise how clever the writing is until the end.
4.5 stars, rounded down.
Victor Forde is fifty-four, and has been asked to leave his house by his wife. He moves back to the neighborhood of his childhood. He starts going to the local pub for a couple of pints in the evening. And there he is cornered by a man, Fitzpatrick, who claims he went to school with him - but Victor can't remember him. But Fitzpatrick seems to know a lot about his school years. Victor certainly doesn't like him, but he is aways around on the periphery of his day to day activities.
So the novel is a slow reveal, it flashes back through Victor's life - the Christian Brothers run school (memories of one particular Brother - who couldn't keep his hands to himself), how he met his beautiful and successful wife (although they never got around to getting married), his career in journalism and writing. And it is cleverly crafted. There are layers of information, and there are gaps - some gaps are filled in due course, others are not. Then, there is the ending.
It has been a while since I have ready a Roddy Doyle novel. Too long, and this one was excellent, although it is sad and dark, (and deals with some sexual abuse, so consider that if that is triggering for you as a reader). As another reviewer put it, you don't realise how clever the writing is until the end.
4.5 stars, rounded down.
January 26, 2018
4.5 rounded up
One Amazon reviewer: ". All the reviews that talked about the shocking twist had to be paid off because anyone could see that twist coming."
BS. I was knocked off my chair.
If there was one word to describe how I felt after finishing this novel, I think it would have to be "shocked." I just sat here thinking about the last page, and continued to think about it for hours. It really is the kind of ending that will stay with you for a long, long time; you might also want to consider following it with something light, if just for your own sanity.
It's so difficult to discuss the book in any sort of depth because I don't want to give away anything at all that would ruin things for potential readers. Anything I say re plot will do just that so let's leave it at this: as the cover blurb reveals, Smile is a tale of memory and contending with the past, and I think I'll leave it there. I would strongly advise not reading any reviews that give away the show; I noticed on Amazon that many readers went ahead and blew the ending for others in what they had to say, so avoid reading those at all costs.
Smile is a brilliant novel written by a brilliant writer; I have only read Doyle's Barrytown books (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van,and The Guts) which I absolutely loved. Smile goes into deeper, darker territory than those four, although I have to admit that there were quite a few humorous moments to be found here that actually made me laugh before the story began to take the turn toward the dark that culminates in those final, mind-shattering pages.
I can't recommend it highly enough. Don't buzz through it, and don't be surprised if after the last page you want to immediately read it again. It's just that kind of book.
http://www.readingavidly.com/2018/01/...
One Amazon reviewer: ". All the reviews that talked about the shocking twist had to be paid off because anyone could see that twist coming."
BS. I was knocked off my chair.
If there was one word to describe how I felt after finishing this novel, I think it would have to be "shocked." I just sat here thinking about the last page, and continued to think about it for hours. It really is the kind of ending that will stay with you for a long, long time; you might also want to consider following it with something light, if just for your own sanity.
It's so difficult to discuss the book in any sort of depth because I don't want to give away anything at all that would ruin things for potential readers. Anything I say re plot will do just that so let's leave it at this: as the cover blurb reveals, Smile is a tale of memory and contending with the past, and I think I'll leave it there. I would strongly advise not reading any reviews that give away the show; I noticed on Amazon that many readers went ahead and blew the ending for others in what they had to say, so avoid reading those at all costs.
Smile is a brilliant novel written by a brilliant writer; I have only read Doyle's Barrytown books (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van,and The Guts) which I absolutely loved. Smile goes into deeper, darker territory than those four, although I have to admit that there were quite a few humorous moments to be found here that actually made me laugh before the story began to take the turn toward the dark that culminates in those final, mind-shattering pages.
I can't recommend it highly enough. Don't buzz through it, and don't be surprised if after the last page you want to immediately read it again. It's just that kind of book.
http://www.readingavidly.com/2018/01/...
October 18, 2017
We’ve got a couple of months to go, but it’s safe to say that Roddy Doyle’s “Smile” is the most bitterly ironic title of 2017.
Ha, ha, ha, indeed.
Doyle, who won the Booker Prize in 1993 for his portrayal of young Paddy Clarke, is the Irish master of crumpled hope — and no country provides stiffer competition in that category.
His new novel offers a deceptively languid plot laced with menace. Paced more like a short story than a novel, “Smile” creates contradictory feelings of poignant stagnation and accelerating descent.
The narrator, 54-year-old Victor Forde, speaks with a kind of plaintive congeniality that immediately scratches your. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
Ha, ha, ha, indeed.
Doyle, who won the Booker Prize in 1993 for his portrayal of young Paddy Clarke, is the Irish master of crumpled hope — and no country provides stiffer competition in that category.
His new novel offers a deceptively languid plot laced with menace. Paced more like a short story than a novel, “Smile” creates contradictory feelings of poignant stagnation and accelerating descent.
The narrator, 54-year-old Victor Forde, speaks with a kind of plaintive congeniality that immediately scratches your. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
September 19, 2017
This is my first taste of a Roddy Doyle novel and this book highlighted to me the authors excellent writing style, full of wit with a disturbing backdrop.
Having just moved into a new apartment, Victor Forde goes to Donnelly’s pub for a pint, He is interrupted by a strangely dressed man in shorts and a pink shirt who sits down next to him. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from school, and tells Victor his name is Fitzpatrick. Victor takes an instant dislike to Fitzpatrick and of the memories he reminds him of being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts memories of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame on the radio. But who is Eddie Fitzpatrick and what does he want with Victor? This is a dark story that is full of humour that will hook the reader. Some great characters and excellent dialogue..
I would like to thank Random House UK and Net Galley for supplying a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Having just moved into a new apartment, Victor Forde goes to Donnelly’s pub for a pint, He is interrupted by a strangely dressed man in shorts and a pink shirt who sits down next to him. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from school, and tells Victor his name is Fitzpatrick. Victor takes an instant dislike to Fitzpatrick and of the memories he reminds him of being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts memories of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame on the radio. But who is Eddie Fitzpatrick and what does he want with Victor? This is a dark story that is full of humour that will hook the reader. Some great characters and excellent dialogue..
I would like to thank Random House UK and Net Galley for supplying a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
December 27, 2017
Smile by Roddy Doyle is a psychological novel that touches on memory, repression, isolation and the desire for friendship. The main protagonist, Victor, goes each evening to a local pub for a few drinks. One evening, he meets a man in shorts and a pink shirt. His name is Fitzpatrick. Victor doesn't recognize the man, nor particularly like him, but apparently they went to school together. During their time together Fitzpatrick stirs up memories of Victor's time at school which are often conflicting and unsettling. At the bar with his new friends, he talks of being recently separated from his wife, who is locally well-known, and that leads to chapters which go back in time to their courtship and marriage.
I don't want to give too much away on this book. It is more than it first appears and was quite surprising. The writing is terrific, but this book will not appeal to many due to the style and the reveal. Prior to this novel, I had never read Roddy Doyle. This novel, however, was well-written (albeit depressing), and very much outside the box. Well done!
I don't want to give too much away on this book. It is more than it first appears and was quite surprising. The writing is terrific, but this book will not appeal to many due to the style and the reveal. Prior to this novel, I had never read Roddy Doyle. This novel, however, was well-written (albeit depressing), and very much outside the box. Well done!
August 31, 2018
4.5⭐️
Wow. I did not see that whiplash of an ending.
Wow. I did not see that whiplash of an ending.
September 3, 2017
Roddy Doyle does gritty, real life Dublin life with a sense of humour and a great ear for dialogue. It's what he is famous for. Recently he published a series of short dialogues on current affairs, narrated over a pint of beer in a bar (Two Pints). These were previously published in newspapers and were, at best, ephemeral.
So in Smile, where we meet Victor Forde down the pub, having a series of conversations over beer, it is difficult to disengage from Two Pints and see the conversation as something more deep and meaningful. But once this hurdle is overcome, we start to see the emergence of a complex story of love lost, unfulfilled promise and a brutal childhood in a Christian Brothers school. The narrative switches between the past and the conversation in the bar, initially with Eddie Fitzpatrick, a former school student, and latterly with a group of regulars.
And Victor is something of the celebrity, having once been a journalist and a social commentator on the radio himself and married (and separated) from Rachel, a celebrity chef, TV host and founder of Meals on Heels. So as you would imagine, he has stories...
As the novel progresses, the intrigue builds. Eddie has always been a bit creepy, but he starts to become more and more sinister. And it becomes more and more apparent that all is not well with Victor. But the end, when it comes, is weird. That is a surprise as Roddy Doyle has never really done weird before. To start with, you kinda feel WTF? This is not Roddy Doyle as we know him. But give it a day and it will start to fall into place and it is clear that it has been done with a very delicate hand. With hindsight, some of the weirdness was always there, and when it becomes apparent it does not detract in any way from what has gone before.
It is so difficult to describe without spoilers, but please please please give it a go. This is poignant and deals sensitively with one of the most difficult aspects of recent Irish social history. The final result is that Victor feels like a real person who deserves our support. And there are many more Victors out there.
So in Smile, where we meet Victor Forde down the pub, having a series of conversations over beer, it is difficult to disengage from Two Pints and see the conversation as something more deep and meaningful. But once this hurdle is overcome, we start to see the emergence of a complex story of love lost, unfulfilled promise and a brutal childhood in a Christian Brothers school. The narrative switches between the past and the conversation in the bar, initially with Eddie Fitzpatrick, a former school student, and latterly with a group of regulars.
And Victor is something of the celebrity, having once been a journalist and a social commentator on the radio himself and married (and separated) from Rachel, a celebrity chef, TV host and founder of Meals on Heels. So as you would imagine, he has stories...
As the novel progresses, the intrigue builds. Eddie has always been a bit creepy, but he starts to become more and more sinister. And it becomes more and more apparent that all is not well with Victor. But the end, when it comes, is weird. That is a surprise as Roddy Doyle has never really done weird before. To start with, you kinda feel WTF? This is not Roddy Doyle as we know him. But give it a day and it will start to fall into place and it is clear that it has been done with a very delicate hand. With hindsight, some of the weirdness was always there, and when it becomes apparent it does not detract in any way from what has gone before.
It is so difficult to describe without spoilers, but please please please give it a go. This is poignant and deals sensitively with one of the most difficult aspects of recent Irish social history. The final result is that Victor feels like a real person who deserves our support. And there are many more Victors out there.
September 10, 2017
This follows our protagonist Victor as he flashes between events of his childhood and his new life as an adult bachelor.
I enjoyed the idea of this book, but not quite the execution of it. It felt like we didn't ever get into the story and the character, we were always just skimming over the top. It didn't always quite make sense and I struggled the whole time to really see where the story was headed.
The very start of the book has a very sinister tone and suggests at a mystery. Then we make an about face and discuss victors relationship with an attractive TV personality, get to know his buddies at the pub, and watch scenes from his childhood. So it all begins to feel a bit like a family drama, then in the very last few pages we make an abrupt turn again and it is a whole different story. The "surprise" end felt so out of place, which is a shame because it could have been an interesting topic to explore as it very much shadows a piece of classic literature (I hesitate to say which as I don't want to spoil the end). It all happened so fast and there were so many holes in the story. I would have enjoyed more time actually getting to know the two characters better and seeing more of their lives. We spent sooooo much time on his romantic (wink wink) encounters with Rachel it all just began to feel a bit gratuitous, there was so many far more interesting facets of his life to explore. Victor began to feel just like a static character almost caricature and not a real person at all. And absolutely no time was spent on Eddie so we really didn't have much context for the ending. I did enjoy the dialogue, it was witty and entertaining and you really felt like you were experiencing an Irish pub. The rest of the story lacked cohesion and there was often parts that didn't really seem to fit in. I appreciate what the author was trying to do, I think it just missed the mark....by quite a bit....
An ebook copy of this book was provided to me through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review for more reviews and other bookish things visit my blog https://unlikleymagic.com
An ebook copy of this book was provided to me through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review for more reviews and other bookish things visit my blog https://unlikleymagic.com
December 23, 2019
A bitter sweet tale of a man reflecting on a failed marriage and childhood abuse at the hands of the monks in his Catholic school. I know this sounds really depressing but Doyle manages to write about this situation in a sympathetic and often funny way.
Not his best book, but worth a read nontheless
Not his best book, but worth a read nontheless
January 20, 2018
To be honest, I didn't really enjoy reading Smile all that much. I rushed through it, in part because it was due back to the library and in part because I just am not that interested in reading about some guy having raunchy sex with his beautiful wife. Or girlfriend, or whatever. The language is consistently foul -- the f word, the c word. When you're speed reading, the fact that the f word can be a verb, a noun, an adjective or an adverb can be a little confusing, especially when it's three different parts of speech all in one sentence. I did have to slow down and re-read parts when I realized I had totally lost the thread. That happened sometimes during the flashbacks to the Catholic boys school our narrator attended, and also during the scenes 30 years later in which our narrator is at the pub and the guys are buying each other drinks. Is that really how men talk? I guess I'm not doubting it, just thinking it sounds pretty dull. Seriously, isn't there anything else to talk about? Maybe the weather? Doesn't the weather ever do anything interesting in Ireland? Plus, maybe I am doubting it, because it's not entirely clear that our narrator actually knows what it's like to hang out in a bar with a bunch of guys all buying drinks for each other, or even that he really remembers hanging out with the boys from his old school.
I've learned to be skeptical of unreliable narrators because they are so often hateful people doing hateful things, but in Smile, Doyle gives us a narrator who says he's not entirely sure he's being honest, but we still can ... hmmm.... I'm not sure I want to say I like him. But I feel warmly to him. He tells us about snarky record reviews, but he feels bad about them. He was so thrilled to be loved by a woman who needed him. He's a guy who, even as the story unfolds, has some vulnerabilities that balance his obnoxiousness. And by the time we get to the end -- well, here's where the spoiler alerts begin.
Brilliant work.
As I say, I didn't enjoy reading it, but it was brilliant. Five stars.
I've learned to be skeptical of unreliable narrators because they are so often hateful people doing hateful things, but in Smile, Doyle gives us a narrator who says he's not entirely sure he's being honest, but we still can ... hmmm.... I'm not sure I want to say I like him. But I feel warmly to him. He tells us about snarky record reviews, but he feels bad about them. He was so thrilled to be loved by a woman who needed him. He's a guy who, even as the story unfolds, has some vulnerabilities that balance his obnoxiousness. And by the time we get to the end -- well, here's where the spoiler alerts begin.
Brilliant work.
As I say, I didn't enjoy reading it, but it was brilliant. Five stars.
November 24, 2017
I knew what I'd just done. I'd invented something that would live for years. My own monster, and I was giving it to my friends, the only people I cared about and the only people who really, really frightened me, because of how things shifted, how the wrong word, the wrong shirt, the wrong band, an irresistible smile, could destroy you. You had to have something useful, your size or a temper, or a sister. The Brothers were zombies. Because I said they were.
It has been a lot of years since I read Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and I'll never forget that it left me wrung out; moved to tears over Paddy's sad childhood. Over the years I've read other books by Roddy Doyle, but Smile is the first to recapture some of what I loved in that first read. Doyle really gets people and has a talent for capturing the little moments that make up a life. And as brief and scattered as this narrative is, we end knowing exactly who Victor Forde is; what childhood dramas moulded his whole life; and when he ended in tears, so did I.
This tale is a slow reveal, jumping from the present to the past and back again, so I don't want to say too much about the plot. As it opens, Victor Forde – fifty-four years old and recently asked to leave his home by the beautiful and successful woman he never actually got around to marrying – has returned to the Dublin neighbourhood where he grew up, and deciding that he needs to force himself to go out and rejoin the world, he chooses a nearby pub to be his local. Nearly immediately Victor is cornered by a man who claims to have gone to school with him, and while this Fitzpatrick knows all the embarrassing details of their childhood days that Victor would like to forget, Victor can't remember the other man at all. Through flashback scenes we learn about Victor's years in a Christian Brothers school, the early success as a journalist that led him to drop out of university, his meeting and falling in love with a woman who would go on to start a massively successful catering and television career, and his own efforts to turn his journalism into a book on Ireland. Victor eventually falls in with a chummy group of blokes at the pub who envy him his successful life and famous wife, but Fitzpatrick is never far from the scene; threatening to undermine everything with his intimate knowledge.
I loved everything about Doyle's writing – in the details and in the big picture – and with so few scenes, he was able to precisely draw Victor's homelife, his school days, his falling in love, his career of provoking the establishment, and his descent into middle-aged mediocrity wherein all the old interpersonal pitfalls apply; I believed every word of it. Long passages made me smile knowingly and I'd quote off of every page if they weren't so dang long. The following is from Victor's first meeting with Rachel's posh parents; people who aren't too keen on the young man who writes articles on abortion and contraceptives:
Sunday in our house was one smell, one taste, one quite happy memory. This, though, was wild and unrepeatable. There were things in this gravy. An onion – a whole onion – slid over the lip of the potty when I poured some of it onto my plate. I'd never had to pour my own gravy before. The onion – I didn't know what it was at first – fell onto the plate. I was sitting alone; there were empty chairs on either side of me. I looked across at Rachel. She grinned at me and chewed. She gave me a little wave with the hand that held her fork. But the gravy – it was black. It was alive. The onion was the blood-covered head of one of the unborn babies I'd been writing and talking about. I stuck some of the gravy to the side of a carrot – glazed – and managed to get it to my mouth without lowering my head too far. And, Jesus – the taste. This was the Southside. This was what it was all about. There was wine in there, and history. This stuff went back to the Norsemen. It went straight to the blood. I wanted to beat my chest.
Ultimately, it would take quoting the entire book to demonstrate what Doyle actually pulls off here, and I won't do that, but will reiterate: I enjoyed this immensely; even through tears.
March 8, 2019
Roddy Doyle önemli bir İrlandalı yazar. Türkçe’ye hiç çevrildi mi doğrusu bilmiyorum. Daha önce “A Star Called Henry”sini zamanında büyük bir beğeniyle okumuştum. Güzel bir filme çekilen müzikal ağırlıklı “Commitments”ın da yazarı. İrlanda ruhuna nüfuz eden bir yazar. Önceki yıl yayınlan bu son romanı da fazlasıyla “İrlandalı”.
Hem çok başarılı bir kariyere sahip hem de çok çekici karısından yeni boşanmış, iş hayatında dikiş tutturamamış 50’lerindeki başkahramanın, çocukluğunu geçirdiği Dublin’deki eski mahallesine taşınıp burada mekanı bellediği bir pub’da rastladığı, eski okul arkadaşı olduğunu iddia eden rahatsız edici bir tipin kendisine geçmişte yaşadığı karanlık tecrübeleri hatırlatmasıyla o döneme geri dönüşleri de içeren bir kurguyla anlatılan hikayesini okuyoruz. Bastırılan hafızanın bir tetiklemeyle zincirlerini boşaltması, cinsel tacizin paramparça ettiği hayatlar, orta yaşlardaki kadın-erkek ilişkilerinin dinamikleri, İrlanda toplumunu meşgul etmeye devam eden dinin (Katolikliğin) toplumsal hayattaki rolü, kürtaj etrafındaki kutuplaşma gibi sorunlar romanda dikkat çekilen temalar. Tabii Roddy Doyle’un güçlü olduğu mizah da var biraz ama konuların ağırlığı ışığında dozajı kararında kullanılmış. Diyalogların da ustaca kurgulandığını belirtmek gerek. Kitabın hayli şaşırtıcı, romanı adeta bir postmodern metne dönüştüren, bir başka gözle tekrar baştan okuma isteği uyandıran bir finali de var.
Hem çok başarılı bir kariyere sahip hem de çok çekici karısından yeni boşanmış, iş hayatında dikiş tutturamamış 50’lerindeki başkahramanın, çocukluğunu geçirdiği Dublin’deki eski mahallesine taşınıp burada mekanı bellediği bir pub’da rastladığı, eski okul arkadaşı olduğunu iddia eden rahatsız edici bir tipin kendisine geçmişte yaşadığı karanlık tecrübeleri hatırlatmasıyla o döneme geri dönüşleri de içeren bir kurguyla anlatılan hikayesini okuyoruz. Bastırılan hafızanın bir tetiklemeyle zincirlerini boşaltması, cinsel tacizin paramparça ettiği hayatlar, orta yaşlardaki kadın-erkek ilişkilerinin dinamikleri, İrlanda toplumunu meşgul etmeye devam eden dinin (Katolikliğin) toplumsal hayattaki rolü, kürtaj etrafındaki kutuplaşma gibi sorunlar romanda dikkat çekilen temalar. Tabii Roddy Doyle’un güçlü olduğu mizah da var biraz ama konuların ağırlığı ışığında dozajı kararında kullanılmış. Diyalogların da ustaca kurgulandığını belirtmek gerek. Kitabın hayli şaşırtıcı, romanı adeta bir postmodern metne dönüştüren, bir başka gözle tekrar baştan okuma isteği uyandıran bir finali de var.
September 24, 2017
'Smile' by Roddy Doyle is a definite change from his normal books. Although his huge talent for creating realistic, memorable characters, wonderful dialogue and wit exists in this novel, 'Smile' examines a much more sinister topic than in previous books and delves into the heart breaking repercussions and the lifetime effects of abuse for Victor, the novels main character. This is an immensely brave novel from Doyle. Initially I thought the ending strange as I hadn’t guessed the outcome throughout, however I'm in awe of the entire book hours after finishing it and will need now to take time and go back over the story again and digest it to truly appreciate every aspect of this wonderful piece of work and the clever style and masterful way in which it was portrayed . This is a story I won't forget. Bravo! My thanks to Random House UK and NetGalley for this copy for review.
August 17, 2020
Personajele lui Roddy Doyle nu prea zâmbesc, fiind prinse într-un carusel al rememorării momentelor din viața tristă pe care au trăit-o. Deși mare parte a romanului se petrece într-un pub (și asta ar fi trebuit să-mi stârnească interesul, nu?), totul este despre trecut: o molestare sexuală într-o Școală Catolică; o căsnicie aparent fericită și plină de sexualitate, care se sfârșește într-un divorț; colegi de școală distruși psihic, despre care nu își mai amintește nimic. O amestecătură de scene și o pendulare permanentă între prezent și trecut, încât la final rămâi nedumerit: Oare ce-a vrut să spună autorul? Unde a vrut să ajungă și de ce nu a reușit să o facă și să ne explice totul răspicat și clar?
Prea puține zâmbete...
Prea puține zâmbete...
November 29, 2017
I kept changing my mind as I was listening to this audiobook (read by Doyle himself) but now that I’m finished (and have mopped up my tears), I’m calling it a small, quiet masterpiece. If you've enjoyed any of Doyle's writing in the past or want a nice introduction to how powerful his writing can be, this is a great place to start--and since you're better off not knowing much about the book going into it, you might as well just read it real quick.
September 1, 2025
I read this novel back in 2018 (I am writing this in January 2025) and at the time I made a note that I thought the novel was 'lovely'. Whether or not it was a good or a flawed novel I didn't say because I didn't know. Roddy Doyle writes of a Dublin that I had known and grown up knowing (I don't say it was the Dublin I grew up in because that wouldn't be strictly true) and his ability to capture the life and speech of working class Dublin has dazzled and moved me since his 'Commitments'.
‘Smile’ is about regret, memory, guilt, lies and ‘what your life would’ve been like if it had been a bit different…’. The problem is that the ‘what-if’ premise is stretched so far that by the end it is open to question has it gone to far?
I am very deliberately not being specific because I don't believe in reviews providing plot points unless unavoidable and because when they are so integral to a novel, such as 'Smile', to reveal them is to cauterize the novel's impact. But if you want them then read other GR reviews, they all reveal and revolve around the novel's plot.
Perhaps in a novel about suppressed and fallible memory it is appropriate that the 'truth' should be opaque, that a novel about abuse should leave readers feeling unsettled. Exactly why and how is individual, I lived through those times and what stands out is not a memory of an 'alien' Church committing horrors but a complicit population refusing to acknowledge the truth.
I enjoyed the novel and liked much of it but I wonder if the level of cleverness doesn't obscure an easy understanding. I don't know if I would like the novel as much now. But I don't regret reading it, though I doubt I will read it again.
‘Smile’ is about regret, memory, guilt, lies and ‘what your life would’ve been like if it had been a bit different…’. The problem is that the ‘what-if’ premise is stretched so far that by the end it is open to question has it gone to far?
I am very deliberately not being specific because I don't believe in reviews providing plot points unless unavoidable and because when they are so integral to a novel, such as 'Smile', to reveal them is to cauterize the novel's impact. But if you want them then read other GR reviews, they all reveal and revolve around the novel's plot.
Perhaps in a novel about suppressed and fallible memory it is appropriate that the 'truth' should be opaque, that a novel about abuse should leave readers feeling unsettled. Exactly why and how is individual, I lived through those times and what stands out is not a memory of an 'alien' Church committing horrors but a complicit population refusing to acknowledge the truth.
I enjoyed the novel and liked much of it but I wonder if the level of cleverness doesn't obscure an easy understanding. I don't know if I would like the novel as much now. But I don't regret reading it, though I doubt I will read it again.
December 31, 2017
*2.5 stars*
Victor, having recently left a long-term relationship, moves into an apartment in his old neighbourhood and begins frequenting his local on a regular basis. One night he is approached by a man named Fitzpatrick who remembers Victor from their days at the Christian Brothers school. Try as he might, Victor cannot remember Fitzpatrick. The book alternates between the present day at the pub, scenes from Victor’s successful life prior to the breakup with his partner, and remembrances from his school days.
The book was well-written (of course it was - Roddy Doyle!), tackled some weighty subject matter, and the story very cleverly laid out. I only gave it 2.5 stars though because I found it oh so boring. By the time I got to the big twist/reveal, I didn’t even care because I just wanted the book to be over with. Too bad because such an important story deserved to have made much more of an impact than it did.
Thanks to Goodreads Giveaways and the publishers for providing me a copy of this book.
Victor, having recently left a long-term relationship, moves into an apartment in his old neighbourhood and begins frequenting his local on a regular basis. One night he is approached by a man named Fitzpatrick who remembers Victor from their days at the Christian Brothers school. Try as he might, Victor cannot remember Fitzpatrick. The book alternates between the present day at the pub, scenes from Victor’s successful life prior to the breakup with his partner, and remembrances from his school days.
The book was well-written (of course it was - Roddy Doyle!), tackled some weighty subject matter, and the story very cleverly laid out. I only gave it 2.5 stars though because I found it oh so boring. By the time I got to the big twist/reveal, I didn’t even care because I just wanted the book to be over with. Too bad because such an important story deserved to have made much more of an impact than it did.
Thanks to Goodreads Giveaways and the publishers for providing me a copy of this book.
January 8, 2020
When I began to read Smile, I was a bit anxious. After all, the last time I read a Roddy Doyle was The Woman who Walked into Doors back in 2001. What if Doyle lost his touch? What if I’m not the intended audience for his books?
To be honest I didn’t need to worry because, for me, Smile was reuniting with a long lost friend, one who became brainier during the interim period. Smile is indeed Doyle at his cleverest. Yet it still has his common trademarks. It focuses on topical issues but injects some dark humor as well.
The main protagonist is a failed writer , Vic, who meets an old school friend and then remembers one particularly nasty incident which happened to him when he was at school. As a result of this encounter, Vic has trouble with his love life, although his partner, Rachel stays with him for a long time.
Or does she?
Smile’s main theme is abuse in schools, how it is dealt with by society and the lasting effects. The novel touches on other topics, namely the notion of the unreliable narrator. Throughout the book, Vic drops certain clues and repetitions which create little clouds of doubt in the reader’s mind. Without giving much away, this all leads to a terrifying conclusion which I never expected from Roddy Doyle.
Smile was a compulsive read, sometimes surprising, sometimes funny and sometimes puzzling. If I read everything I would say it’s his best work to date but I can say from the five books I’ve read, it is definitely his best. This also means that I better start reading his back catalogue.
To be honest I didn’t need to worry because, for me, Smile was reuniting with a long lost friend, one who became brainier during the interim period. Smile is indeed Doyle at his cleverest. Yet it still has his common trademarks. It focuses on topical issues but injects some dark humor as well.
The main protagonist is a failed writer , Vic, who meets an old school friend and then remembers one particularly nasty incident which happened to him when he was at school. As a result of this encounter, Vic has trouble with his love life, although his partner, Rachel stays with him for a long time.
Or does she?
Smile’s main theme is abuse in schools, how it is dealt with by society and the lasting effects. The novel touches on other topics, namely the notion of the unreliable narrator. Throughout the book, Vic drops certain clues and repetitions which create little clouds of doubt in the reader’s mind. Without giving much away, this all leads to a terrifying conclusion which I never expected from Roddy Doyle.
Smile was a compulsive read, sometimes surprising, sometimes funny and sometimes puzzling. If I read everything I would say it’s his best work to date but I can say from the five books I’ve read, it is definitely his best. This also means that I better start reading his back catalogue.
June 29, 2017
I really can't decide, on balance, whether I liked this book.
Loved: the dialogue (nobody writes dialogue like Roddy Doyle), the humour, the sense of place...
Disliked: the mid-life moaning, the sourness about life...
But the ending upsets everything! It came out of nowhere, and upends all your expectations, and now I'm not sure how I feel.
But I think I like it more now than I did while reading it...hmmm.
Loved: the dialogue (nobody writes dialogue like Roddy Doyle), the humour, the sense of place...
Disliked: the mid-life moaning, the sourness about life...
But the ending upsets everything! It came out of nowhere, and upends all your expectations, and now I'm not sure how I feel.
But I think I like it more now than I did while reading it...hmmm.
August 14, 2017
This is entertaining throughout and occasionally quite moving but - and I can't think of anyway to say this without creating a spoiler - the resolution amounts to nothing more than the worst 'it was all a dream after all' stories. It's not a dream and I understand and appreciate the rationale behind somebody being so damaged as to fabricate an imaginary life, but I just felt cheated.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 8, 2018
This is a quick read and to be honest there were long scenes of the protagonist, 53-year-old Victor Forde, which his "would-be friends", a group of his male contemporaries, that I skimmed. Too much male blathering...
The book begins with Victor moving into new digs. We learn he's left his wife, but not why. He has a son, who he barely mentions. The beginning of the book goes into detail about his teenage years as a student in a Christian Brothers school, a central part of the story, and endless detail about his sex life with his wife in their early days together.
Victor is a man who has achieved little in life, except for being attached to a successful woman. Issues of Ireland of the past 3 decades including birth control, abortion and clerical abuse, are central. He works for years on a book about the "real" Ireland. But he is at the end of the day a stupendous failure at everything.
As the cover blurb promises, there is a surprise at the end. It's hard to know who might enjoy this book. Men past their prime? Fans of Doyle? I am giving it 3 stars because it is somewhat engaging and at the end has something to say about critical issues in contemporary Ireland of the past 30 years.
The book begins with Victor moving into new digs. We learn he's left his wife, but not why. He has a son, who he barely mentions. The beginning of the book goes into detail about his teenage years as a student in a Christian Brothers school, a central part of the story, and endless detail about his sex life with his wife in their early days together.
Victor is a man who has achieved little in life, except for being attached to a successful woman. Issues of Ireland of the past 3 decades including birth control, abortion and clerical abuse, are central. He works for years on a book about the "real" Ireland. But he is at the end of the day a stupendous failure at everything.
As the cover blurb promises, there is a surprise at the end. It's hard to know who might enjoy this book. Men past their prime? Fans of Doyle? I am giving it 3 stars because it is somewhat engaging and at the end has something to say about critical issues in contemporary Ireland of the past 30 years.
September 7, 2017
A powerful voice in Irish writing returns with an evocative novel illustrating once again the misery, pain and ruined lives caused by the sexual abuse scandal prevalent within the Catholic Church from the 1950's. Victor Forde is now a lone single man who spends part of each day in Donnelly's public house. He makes the acquaintance of Fitzpatrick, who he instantly takes a dislike to. There is something strange and unwarranted about this individual, that wakes some very painful memories in the mind of Forde, and in particular the time he spent as a child within the care of the Christian Brothers.
What is astounding and memorable about "Smile" is the author's direct, compelling brutal and unforgivable method of storytelling. This makes me want to revisit classics I read many years ago and in particular The Van and the wonderfully titled Paddy Clarke ha ha. It is so refreshing to read his simple style of prose that forms an instant connection with the reader, and makes him loathe and pity Forde in equal measures. ..." a man of my age going back to some wrinkled version of his childhood. Looking for the girls he'd fancied forty years before"...."I was so bored, so heavy with the physical weight of it, I could have cried"......"Do you want it? No, thanks, I said. It was nice talking to you she said. She died five months later."..."It was the last time I slept in my mother's house and it was the last time I went for pints with the lads. Two of them are dead. I miss them like I miss my father.".....
The conclusion of this story was never going to make pleasant reading, it was unforeseen, sudden and yet an apt and fitting ending to a novel that will remain with my for many weeks and months. A monumental achievement and a welcome return to one of Ireland's most talented of writers. Many thanks to Random House uk and netgalley for a gratis copy in exchange for an honest review and that is what I have written.
What is astounding and memorable about "Smile" is the author's direct, compelling brutal and unforgivable method of storytelling. This makes me want to revisit classics I read many years ago and in particular The Van and the wonderfully titled Paddy Clarke ha ha. It is so refreshing to read his simple style of prose that forms an instant connection with the reader, and makes him loathe and pity Forde in equal measures. ..." a man of my age going back to some wrinkled version of his childhood. Looking for the girls he'd fancied forty years before"...."I was so bored, so heavy with the physical weight of it, I could have cried"......"Do you want it? No, thanks, I said. It was nice talking to you she said. She died five months later."..."It was the last time I slept in my mother's house and it was the last time I went for pints with the lads. Two of them are dead. I miss them like I miss my father.".....
The conclusion of this story was never going to make pleasant reading, it was unforeseen, sudden and yet an apt and fitting ending to a novel that will remain with my for many weeks and months. A monumental achievement and a welcome return to one of Ireland's most talented of writers. Many thanks to Random House uk and netgalley for a gratis copy in exchange for an honest review and that is what I have written.
December 12, 2017
Is it possible for a book to be tedious and infuriating at the same time? This is how I felt about ‘Smile’. I didn’t find this engaging at all. It took me ages to read as I kept reading a little bit then falling asleep. It picked up a bit towards the end and I thought it was getting better. Sadly, no. When I finished it, I actually said out loud, ‘That was just ridiculous.’
It’s a bit heartbreaking for me to write this review because Roddy Doyle used to be one of my favourite authors. I adored the Barrytown trilogy, ‘The woman who walked into doors’ and I think ‘Paddy Clarke ha ha ha’ is one of the greatest books of all time. After reading ‘Smile’ though, I’m going to think twice about reading any more Roddy Doyle books.
It’s a bit heartbreaking for me to write this review because Roddy Doyle used to be one of my favourite authors. I adored the Barrytown trilogy, ‘The woman who walked into doors’ and I think ‘Paddy Clarke ha ha ha’ is one of the greatest books of all time. After reading ‘Smile’ though, I’m going to think twice about reading any more Roddy Doyle books.
September 19, 2017
The great Irish storyteller Roddy Doyle has given us a rather unreliable narrator in Victor Forde, who has taken to seeking solace for his mid-life crisis in the local pub fraternity of regulars, bonding over a few pints each evening. Accosted by a boorish stranger one day, claiming to be an old school acquaintance, Victor finds himself forced to revisit scenes from his youth that he would rather forget - in particular, his sexual abuse at the hands of one of the sadistic Christian Brothers. The puzzle that nags at the reader is – why does he keep going back, night after night, to face the increasingly uncomfortable reminiscences with this sinister ghost from the past who he does not recognise, but who seems to know everything about him?
The mood of foreboding builds to the devastating finale, when the reader finally discovers the narrative trick that has been played – one that will make you want to re-read and re-evaluate all that has been hinted at, but cleverly disguised with Doyle’s subtle writer’s sleight of hand.
I received this as ebook from the publisher via Netgalley.
The mood of foreboding builds to the devastating finale, when the reader finally discovers the narrative trick that has been played – one that will make you want to re-read and re-evaluate all that has been hinted at, but cleverly disguised with Doyle’s subtle writer’s sleight of hand.
I received this as ebook from the publisher via Netgalley.
February 19, 2019
It's no secret that I love Roddy Doyle and everything he writes and think he's a genius. This book just makes me more certain that I'm not wrong. Almost right from the start, eight pages in to be exact, the unease begins to creep into the peripheral vision. It wriggles around, while Victor Forde tells his story, the story of his very interesting life as a writer, as husband to the successful Rachel. Something's not quite comfortable, and it expands, makes Victor notice it, reject it, and finally face it. The crafting is skillfully paced and the plot perfectly unfolded. It's a hard story. When it's fully unfolded, there isn't a pretty surprise inside.
November 18, 2024
Read January 2020/Min. edits July 2020
This is one of those novels where you don’t realize, until the end, how good it actually is. That was my experience anyway. Unusual for me, I hadn’t read any reviews before hand, only the dust cover description which closes with:
“By the last page, you will have been challenged to question everything you think you remember so clearly.”
True, true: you question everything, as pertains to what you’ve just read, and everything you think you remember about your own life as well. Trolling memories for the truth is a bitch, especially when traumas and the long passage of years muddy the water, so to speak. Like I said, I hadn’t seen any reviews, with all those exclamations (and sometimes spoilers) that a huge surprise awaits, and I’d completely forgotten that last line in the dust cover. And --my bad-- no matter how many books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen, I still haven’t trained myself to anticipate plot twists or to watch out for an unreliable narrator. So when I hit the ending, it really surprised me, and it was devastating. And it answered some of the questions pestering me: why so little mention of their son?; why are there so many (for me) boring sex scenes?—is he trying to evoke envy for these frequent beddings of a beautiful, famous woman? These and other misgivings were erased in those final pages, and what I had “decided” was a pretty good novel elevated itself to something quite memorable.
A memorable quote, doubly-so for those who've read the book:
“There’s a joke I heard years ago, about an Irishman who ends up on a desert island with Claudia Schiffer, after a plane crash. There’s just the two of them, sitting on the sand. After a few days of this, she moves closer to him. ‘Do you wish to ride me, Dermot?’ she says. ‘Jesus, Claudia,’ he says. ‘Like – are you sure?’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We will be here for quite some time, I think. And the days are quite long – yes?’ So, they start riding. All day. And Claudia falls hopelessly in love with him. This goes on for months until one day, the Irishman stands up and moves down the beach a bit and sits by himself. Claudia gets up and follows him. ‘Dermot?’ she says. ‘Is something the matter?’ ‘Ah, sure,’ he says. ‘I’m just a bit down in the dumps.’ ‘Is there something I can do to help?’ she asks him. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘This might sound mad. But would you mind if I called you Des?’ She looks at him, then says, ‘Alright. I will permit this.’ ‘Great,’ he says. ‘Brilliant, thanks.’ He’s holding a piece of charcoal that he found on the beach. He shows it to Claudia and he says, ‘And, like – would you mind if I drew a moustache on you?’ And she looks at him again, and says, ‘Alright, Dermot. This, too, I will permit.’ ‘Ah, great – thanks.’ He draws a rough moustache on her, then stands back. Then he grabs her shoulders, shakes her, and says, ‘Des! Des! You won’t believe who I’ve been riding for the last three months!”
This is one of those novels where you don’t realize, until the end, how good it actually is. That was my experience anyway. Unusual for me, I hadn’t read any reviews before hand, only the dust cover description which closes with:
“By the last page, you will have been challenged to question everything you think you remember so clearly.”
True, true: you question everything, as pertains to what you’ve just read, and everything you think you remember about your own life as well. Trolling memories for the truth is a bitch, especially when traumas and the long passage of years muddy the water, so to speak. Like I said, I hadn’t seen any reviews, with all those exclamations (and sometimes spoilers) that a huge surprise awaits, and I’d completely forgotten that last line in the dust cover. And --my bad-- no matter how many books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen, I still haven’t trained myself to anticipate plot twists or to watch out for an unreliable narrator. So when I hit the ending, it really surprised me, and it was devastating. And it answered some of the questions pestering me: why so little mention of their son?; why are there so many (for me) boring sex scenes?—is he trying to evoke envy for these frequent beddings of a beautiful, famous woman? These and other misgivings were erased in those final pages, and what I had “decided” was a pretty good novel elevated itself to something quite memorable.
A memorable quote, doubly-so for those who've read the book:
“There’s a joke I heard years ago, about an Irishman who ends up on a desert island with Claudia Schiffer, after a plane crash. There’s just the two of them, sitting on the sand. After a few days of this, she moves closer to him. ‘Do you wish to ride me, Dermot?’ she says. ‘Jesus, Claudia,’ he says. ‘Like – are you sure?’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We will be here for quite some time, I think. And the days are quite long – yes?’ So, they start riding. All day. And Claudia falls hopelessly in love with him. This goes on for months until one day, the Irishman stands up and moves down the beach a bit and sits by himself. Claudia gets up and follows him. ‘Dermot?’ she says. ‘Is something the matter?’ ‘Ah, sure,’ he says. ‘I’m just a bit down in the dumps.’ ‘Is there something I can do to help?’ she asks him. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘This might sound mad. But would you mind if I called you Des?’ She looks at him, then says, ‘Alright. I will permit this.’ ‘Great,’ he says. ‘Brilliant, thanks.’ He’s holding a piece of charcoal that he found on the beach. He shows it to Claudia and he says, ‘And, like – would you mind if I drew a moustache on you?’ And she looks at him again, and says, ‘Alright, Dermot. This, too, I will permit.’ ‘Ah, great – thanks.’ He draws a rough moustache on her, then stands back. Then he grabs her shoulders, shakes her, and says, ‘Des! Des! You won’t believe who I’ve been riding for the last three months!”
September 30, 2017
This is one of those books that is difficult to review in any depth without spoiling it for others, but here are just a few very general thoughts. There are many of the ingredients you’d expect from a Roddy Doyle book, brilliant banter for one and this is just as entertaining as ever, the pub atmosphere too is spot on. The story seems fairly straightforward to begin with - a middle-aged man at a crossroads in his life, moving back into the area he grew up in, reflecting on his life and all the ‘what if?’ moments. Then a chance meeting in a bar with an old schoolmate stirs up unwelcome memories. So far, not such an unfamiliar scenario. Their relationship is more than a little tense and an inkling of foreboding creeps in.
It starts to go in an unexpected direction towards the end, though by the time I’d come to the absolute end I realised that it had veered off long before and that the ending wasn’t really as unexpected as it seemed. The sort of thing that has you going back to the beginning and skimming through to see if the pointers you now think you remember were really there. Cleverly and carefully constructed. An unsettling, emotionally affecting story and I imagine it would be perfect for reading groups.
Review copy courtesy of Random House Vintage via NetGalley, many thanks for the opportunity.
It starts to go in an unexpected direction towards the end, though by the time I’d come to the absolute end I realised that it had veered off long before and that the ending wasn’t really as unexpected as it seemed. The sort of thing that has you going back to the beginning and skimming through to see if the pointers you now think you remember were really there. Cleverly and carefully constructed. An unsettling, emotionally affecting story and I imagine it would be perfect for reading groups.
Review copy courtesy of Random House Vintage via NetGalley, many thanks for the opportunity.
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