The Woman Who Walked into Doors

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Summary: The reflections of Paula Spencer.
Review: The reflections of Paula Spencer, a thirty-nine year-oldmother of four, a recent widow, a survivor of seventeenyears of spousal abuse, a reluctant alcoholic, a cleaning woman, and a powerful representation of a wee bit of hope emerging from absolute hopelessness. Her husband, Charlo, has been recently killed by the police after murdering a woman in a botched bank robbery attempt. Much of the pain portrayed in Paula's reflections comes in a tidal wave response to Charlo's final brutal attack. The reader is lead down a painful personal tour of Paula's desperate life. In January, 1996 Doyle introduced this marvelous work with a brief short story in the New Yorker called "Ask Me, Ask Me, Ask Me." Those words are what Paula Spencer hopes every doctor, any nurse, a friend, or even a relative will ask when her feeble excuses like "fell down the stairs" or "walked into a door" become too common or just too unbelievable as her injuries become frequent and more severe. I believed the essay failed in representing a woman's literary voice by a male author: the sentence structure too long, the paragraphs too logical, the complete work too linear. Once I leaped into the book, I was overwhelmed by Doyle's brilliant new style. This is a vivid portrayal of abused woman, and never failing in a continuity of a feminine literary style. Unlike Sharon in The Snapper, Doyle represses his innate masculinity and explores with such precision and dedication the character of Paula. In my previous reading of Paddy Clarke, I raved about the characterization of the turmoil of a young Dublin boy, a character with whom Roddy Doyle could easily associate. Obviously, the far more advanced Paula Spencer is more of a stretch, and his accomplishment of this character is a landmark that will catapult Roddy Doyle into the echelon of Irish literary genius. So as all naysayers may comment on the continued commercial success of another new movie based on the third of his Barrytown trilogy (based on The Van, scheduled to be released late 1996) and who wish to associate him more along the lines of the godawful Michael Crichton or Scott Turrow, I'll mock and laugh at every one of them as Doyle slowly continues to win the respect and admiration of the public, his peers, literary critics, and every last bleeding Irish literary academic scholar.

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Summary: Have fun with some real good literature!
Review: THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS by Roddy Doyle is a book I had a hard time putting down because it pulled me intensively into the story .Doyle writes about an alcoholic woman whose husband abuses her constantly. Not only the story itself, but also the style and the composition of his book are extremely violent. Doyle for instance uses the language of the social area he describes. Some readers might be shocked by the rough, colloquial language his characters use, but they have to keep in mind that it helps to authenticate the setting. His frequent use of dialogue gives the reader a sense of being present in the environment describes. Also, there is no chronological development in the story. The book starts with the end of the actual story and ends in the middle of it. Past and present keep intermingling through the use of flashbacks. The way the story is told reminded me of how our own memory works: events and feelings are randomly thrown together, but to find out how something really happened you must sort everything out. To me, Doyle's highest achievement is the perspective from which the story is told. Doyle, as a man, tried to put himself into a woman's body and soul. I think he succeeded extremely well. Rarely did I, as a female reader, find stereotypical allusions of which I believe some men might be convinced. As can be seen in his earlier books(cf PADDY CLARK HA HA HA or THE SNAPPER), Doyle seems to have a real gift for slipping into characters that have nothing in common with himself. Readers who like to reflect on society will be all the more pleasedthat Doyle's central issue continues to be Irish working class. Some British readers might have seen his TV series FAMILY on BBC that was controversial, because it dealt with family taboos such as abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. Have fun with some real good literature!

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Summary: A Powerful Book
Review: The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is an amazing book, terribly honest too. Couldn't finish it the first time I read it, after the Barrytown Trilogy I decided to reread it and got to appreciate it. Paula is living and charming, it's hard to imagine such delicate feelings of a woman is written by a man. Roddy Doyle wrote about this woman and her terrible married life with the utmost accuracy, he's probably one of the best novelists around.

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Summary: The woman who walked into doors
Review: The women who walked into doors is a very sad story. It's about Paula who is being abused by her husband, Charlo. Because of al the raping and kicking of her husband, she starts drinking alcohol a lot. She has a couple of kids, which she wants to grow up normal, so she has to stay with Charlo. Without him she cannot raise them up. At the end she kicks Charlo out of their house, after seventeen years being abused by him. I got very sad when I read the story. Everything she is going through is just so bad. The book is not so difficult to read, but sometimes a little bit boring.

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Summary: Stunning
Review: This book is incredible. As ever, Doyle's writing is staggeringly good. This time he writes from the point of view of a woman and it's wholly convincing. At times hilarious, often touching, the story moves into harrowing territory as it becomes clear that Paula is a battered wife.

This is not a "feelgood" book, but I urge you to read it and then try the rest of his work. It's not all quite as good as this, but it's streets ahead of countless others.

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Summary: This book was very disappointing
Review: This book was extremely disappointing to me. The book's topic is great, but you don't get to the topic until you are three-quarters of the way though the book! I made myself keep reading until I got to the actual topic of the story, but I think it started on about page 160, and there are only 226 pages in the book. So, if you can handle complete boredom until then, you may like the book. I do like background and history on the characters, but it should not consume the entire book. I have not read any other of this author's books, so maybe it was just the writing style I did not like. In summary, if you bore easily, do not read this book.

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Summary: Certainly the best book I have ever read
Review: This book was fantastic I could hardly beleve Roddy Doyle's ability to grasp the topic of domestic violence of a woman so realisticly as he is a man! I recommend anyone of any age should read it, I did and did a review on it for my Higher(A level) English.

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Summary: The man was the door
Review: This Irish novel about a battered and alcoholic Dublin woman owes a little to a proletariat and naturalistic traditional of novel writing (James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan comes to mind) that I thought was dead. The first person narration by the central character, Paula Spencer, is painfully real. It's hard not to identify with her. She seems trapped by her poverty and lack of education and her attraction to the wrong kind of man. I found Doyle's treatment of this all too familiar scenario interesting, especially as we see her many years later, but somewhat one-sided. The Irish terms and the lower middle class venue enlivened the narrative and Doyle has a fine eye for sexual and social detail. Nonetheless the tale is dreary in an all too familiar way and his obvious pandering to his female readership is a little embarrassing for a writer as good as he is. I suspect that Doyle was torn between attraction to his central male character, a violent, macho wife beater; but because of his need to be politically correct with feminism, he was never able to develop his character beyond the straw man.

The clever title on one level is a euphemism for a batted woman, but on another suggests something deeper, a blind tropism that the woman couldn't help. I think Doyle needed to develop that potential in the character of the husband as well. For a novelist the toughest thing often is to tell the psychological truth in spite of, and in the face of what your readership expects. Although I have no sympathy for wife beaters, and certainly none for Doyle's pathetic wretch, it is not enough to show that the wife is a victim. The husband is as well. And she makes choices. In the proletariat tradition the cause was poverty; today it is either the "daemonic nature" of males or the values of the patriarchy that lead to the violence. None of these answers is the whole story.

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Summary: So good it hurts
Review: This is a book that reminds me of a joke,

"We don't get Channel 4 round our way, we get our misery direct."

Only our direct misery cannot have the wit and humour that this book has. Paula is full of strength, courage and wit in spite of everything. She is an every woman for the times that we live in. Charlo, although he could be any of a million men, is her downfall, her drug, and the man who drags her down and keeps her in her circle of despair. But like all drugs he is hard to give up, not until he dies, which comes in the first chapters so I'm not giving anything away there, is she free, but it's all too late. She is married to Charlo for nearly two decades; it is a time of alcohol, violence and crime. Despair seeps from ever page mixed up with nostalgia and thick black humour to ease the pain of the reader. The characters are so alive that this book hurts to read at times, Doyle's characterisations are near perfect.
Paula is a flawed character reflecting the life that she has led. Roddy Doyle makes it obvious from the start that there was never any escaping for Paula, from birth, from school, from adolescence she was always on the same path. You can leave the oppressive slum, but the oppressive, esteem robbing slum will never leave you. Paula is told what she is from birth and has no option but to believe it.
An excellently written book that pulls no punches and doesn't try to spare Paula her fate, but it's so sad that I prefer to pretend that it isn't happening, see, there's a lot of Paula in us all.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: This is one of the best books I hav come across in a long time!!!!!! The insight that the reader is given into a home of a battered wife is so beleivable it is easily forgotten that this book is written bya man. You feel for the extrodenary character of Paula Spencer, who has suffered so much from what can only be called an evil husband. Again I would reconmend this book to any one!