On the Wagon

"The woman who walked into doors" is back -- 10 years later and sober.

PAULA SPENCER

A Novel

By Roddy Doyle

Viking. 281 pp. $24.95

Ten years ago, in his superb novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors, the Irish writer Roddy Doyle introduced his readers to Paula Spencer, a tough, passionate, alcoholic Irishwoman with a foul mouth and an unsparing working-class wit. As the book opens, the police inform Paula that her estranged husband, Charlo, has been shot and killed while committing robbery and murder. From there, the book swoops back and forth through episodes of Paula's life: her mostly happy childhood; her whirlwind courtship with Charlo; their marriage and their four children; and, most important, the 17 years of violent abuse she suffered at the hands of Charlo, whom she continued to love until the day he died. In the book's harrowing climactic scene, Paula finally clobbers her wretched husband with a frying pan and throws him out of the house forever. The novel was, as I said in these pages 10 years ago, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, an unsentimental yet not hopeless account of an ordinary woman living a very hard life.

Now, in Doyle's new novel, Paula Spencer, life is better for Paula, but not by much. Still cleaning houses for a living, she's worked her way up to supervisor, making more money than she ever has before, but otherwise her entire life is like a good news/bad news joke. She's a recovering alcoholic with a recent and hard-won sobriety, but she still craves the booze. Her oldest daughter, Nicola, has grown up to become a successful if stressed middle-class businesswoman, but her oldest son, John Paul, disappeared for years into heroin addiction -- though he, too, is in recovery and has recently renewed contact with Paula. Her two other children still live with Paula, and while Leanne has become an alcoholic like her mother, the youngest, Jack, is a smart, sensitive and largely untroubled boy, though he has learned from hard experience not to trust or rely on his mother. And, finally, while Paula no longer has a violent husband who beats her regularly, she has no man in her life at all and hasn't had one since Charlo died.

If Paula Spencer doesn't quite reach the heights or plumb the depths that the earlier book did, it's only because the first novel was richer by design, encompassing through flashbacks the whole of Paula's life, and more inherently dramatic, since it centered on the appalling violence inflicted on its narrator. As a result, The Woman Who Walked into Doors was necessarily more complex, with an artfully jumbled chronology and long blocks of pure exposition in Paula's own voice, evoking a more accessible version of the high Irish modernism of Joyce and Beckett.

Paula Spencer, on the other hand, returns to the simpler, less inflected style of Doyle's earlier, more lighthearted novels of Irish working-class life, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van. Told in the third person instead of the earlier novel's pungent first person, Paula Spencer is largely chronological, following one year of Paula's life, from her 48th birthday to her 49th, and it is largely made up of extended scenes between Paula and her children, her friends and her two lively sisters, Carmel and Denise. If it's less harrowing and artistically pyrotechnic than the earlier book, that's only because Paula's life, thank God, is much calmer than it was before. The book's simpler rhythms reflect the more forgiving spirit of middle age.

Lest this sound like faint praise, let me add that reading Paula Spencer is pure, undiluted pleasure, and it's not necessary to have read the first novel to thoroughly enjoy this one. Paula is still a very funny woman (and her sharp-tongued sister Carmel is even funnier), and Doyle himself is still the master of the extended set-piece. There's a lunch scene with Paula and her two sisters that goes on for 20 pages, and I read it twice, just because it was such fun and so beautifully crafted. In between the tart, sisterly wisecracks, Paula the recovering alcoholic watches her sisters drink:

"Denise pours some of the Ballygowan [mineral water] into her wine glass. She's over the hump, Paula guesses. Now she's just thirsty. Paula's thirsty all the time. She lowers the water, day and night. She brings a plastic bottle with her, with tap water, whenever she thinks of it; when she remembers. And it's the thing that's there when the situation is tricky. . . . When the talk is awkward, the past or the present -- it's the roaring thirst. The dry throat that actually takes over her whole body. And it's not alcohol; that's not what she needs -- that's a different one. It's just water -- dehydration. But it's nearly the same need. She can't cope until she feels the water crawling down through her, and up to the place behind her forehead, the pain there, and the joints right below her ears. Like oil. Calming her, softening the dry edges."

In the end, it would be a stretch to say that Paula is happy now. None of her children trusts her entirely; she still works at a physically demanding job that would tax a woman half her age, and, most of all, she still wrestles every moment with her sobriety, with her guilt for the way she failed her children and with her loneliness. She is, however, happier, and Doyle recognizes that it's often the people with the most difficult lives who cling to hope the hardest -- who know that contentment, if it comes at all, comes an inch at a time. ·

James Hynes is the author, most recently, of the novel "Kings of Infinite Space."