Book Review: Paula Spencer is back amid pandemic lockdown in Roddy Doyle’s brilliant new novel

Paula Spencer returns for another performance in Roddy Doyle’s miraculous latest novel, “The Women Behind the Door.” In this episode, the 66-year-old mother and grandmother, a recovering alcoholic and domestic abuse survivor, has made it through the first year of Covid lockdown in pretty good spirits.

Her abusive husband, Charlo, is long dead, and her four adult children have finally gotten their lives together. She has a strong support system, including her best friend Mary, who got her a part-time job at a dry cleaners she loves, and her longtime boyfriend, Joe, who teaches her noble things like opera, history, and birds.

Then, on the very day in spring 2021 that she and Mary receive their first injection in a Dublin theatre, and then celebrate with a McDonald’s bag on a windswept beach outside the city, her eldest daughter, in her forties, shows up at her door and asks if she can go home.

Throughout this fascinating, dialogue-driven tale, Doyle will gradually reveal why Nicola, whom Paula always considered the most reliable of her children, left her family, including her kind husband Tony and their three daughters. Especially when their youngest, Lily, was still in high school.

At first, her dramatic departure doesn’t seem to make sense. But as the two women talk and Paula reflects on her past, it becomes clear how deeply the alcoholism and abuse have affected everyone in Paula’s family. Nicola’s decision to leave hers – any family in general – begins to seem entirely reasonable.

Doyle first introduced Paula in his 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked Through Doors. The title alludes to an excuse battered women sometimes give to explain their injuries. A decade later, he wrote a sequel, Paula Spencer, in which the widowed, working-class heroine has recently gotten sober and must deal with the damage she has done to her children.

It’s no wonder Doyle, whose other novels include the Booker Prize-winning “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha” and “The Commitments,” has brought her back for another tour. She’s fabulous company, whether chatting with Mary or wandering through a crumbling, pandemic-scarred Dublin, watching Roma gather at the foot of the James Joyce statue on North Earl Street and getting caught up by an immigrant food delivery man speeding past on his electric bike.

With Paula, Doyle created a fictional character as memorable as Molly Bloom or the Wife of Bath.

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