When I tell you that Roddy Doyle’s new novel, Love, is about two 50-ish men talking well-oiled talk in a pub, you’ll say you’ve heard that one before. You haven’t. When I tell you that the novel isn’t so much about what happens, or happened once upon a time, as it is about the mystically inaccurate nature of language, you’ll say you learned that lesson long ago. You didn’t, at least not the way Doyle spins it. When I tell you that in spite of these familiarities, you’ll wind up caring about a bond that seems to rely mainly on words, you’ll say you won’t. You will ... There’s a lot of Joyce in this novel — not the layered density of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, but the layered simplicity of Dubliners, in the straightforward yet incantatory sentences, and in the loading of simple words ... In Love, some of the best language is silence ... Maybe a theme hiding in this novel is that men are not as awful at communicating as we, and women, say we are. There may be as much truth in awkwardness and evasiveness as there is in openness and clarity — the truth latent in floundering, in not being able to say what we mean (must we?) because we haven’t the foggiest idea what we mean.
... this story, with its beer-inspired and home-brewed philosophy, its funny and painful moments, is about love, and not just the love of beer (as the cover art suggests). It’s about love and the remembrance of love between friends, lovers, and family ... Doyle’s narrative style is fast-paced and deceptively easy to read ... But Love is surprisingly weighty. Doyle has put the story in Davy’s mouth as dialogue, interrupted by a few short bits of narration, that goes down as smoothly as gulps of beer. But Joycean dialogue set off with a single em-dash can be confusing, and it’s sometimes hard to identify dialogue as it flows into narration ... it’s easy to imagine Doyle adapting Love, this brilliant two-character story, as a movie with Davy and Joe crawling the pubs and dueling with conflicting memories as their stories flash back to the pubs and women from their past.
... stunning ... What’s not to like about a Roddy Doyle novel? ... The 10-hour binge in Love leaves Davy and Joe hammered. But it leaves the reader with the feeling that love is complicated and simple at the same time.
As with so much of Doyle’s work, Love is heavy on dialogue. So when the narrative shifts away from the often-fraught conversation between Davy and Joe and into Davy’s past, it can feel like a reprieve ... In the devastating final pages, all the hard drinking of the night gives way to an extraordinary tenderness ... Throughout, Doyle imbues the ordinary moment with a certain grace; moving exchanges with taxi drivers, a homeless couple sharing a paperback, a barman standing looking at his phone in the passage between the bar and the lounge. At the very least, anyone who is longing for the quiet comfort of 'a clean well-lighted place' will find some consolation here ... an extraordinary book in which very little happens. But just as music is said to lie in the silence between the notes, it is a masterful study in all that goes unsaid.
His new novel, Love, turns one such tale into a funny, poignant, profane, unpredictable conversation about friendship, marriage, parenthood, aging, Dublin pubs and the eternal mystery of the title ... Love, like much of Doyle’s fiction, is made up largely of dialogue, as if we were down the bar eavesdropping ... Doyle’s description of the place, the regular customers moving in and out, the polished rhythms of the bartenders, the changes in light and sound, will make anyone who loves a good bar feel a pang of longing. It’s their clean, well-lighted place, and Doyle gives a funny wink to Hemingway just to make it clear.
As Love begins, the reader is dropped into the familiar, perfect rhythm of Roddy Doyle’s effortless dialogue: it’s as if we’re sitting at a table alongside these two and can simply start to listen ... The novel is in itself a praise-song to the Irish pub ... Laced into the good humour and camaraderie is an examination of mid-to-late life, as both men measure themselves against their younger selves and against each other. In Doyle’s characteristic sidelong fashion, they consider the world they find themselves in, the decisions they’ve made about their lives ... That end veers towards the sentimental: there is a sense of unearned emotion that draws attention towards the novelist’s construction and away from genuine feeling ... It’s difficult to avoid the sense that Doyle is treading on ground that has become too familiar ... Not much about Love feels new. Doyle’s women — usually so well rounded — feel hastily sketched here. Davy’s Faye is something of a caricature of a lively, mouthy Irish lass. Joe and Davy’s dilemmas and sorrows are not distinctive enough. It’s no trouble to keep listening to their talk, to follow them around on their long Dublin night, but the reader might, in the end, find herself keeping an eye out for more interesting company.
The narrative relies on Doyle’s characteristic banter—unattributed, sometimes comic, often lushly expletive ... Don’t expect linearity, though: this is a tale constantly interrupted by flashbacks, forever getting knocked off course by old tensions and fresh ambivalence ... Is Joe simply a man caught cheating, trying to make of it something mystical, inevitable? It’s a question that tests memory and the ownership of stories, the reader’s patience, too, on occasion ... amid their sozzled swordplay are sentences that casually slay with their mute concision ... The finale comes as a sobering surprise, opening wide a novel that has contrived to feel at once capacious and claustrophobic. After the guilt and envy stirred up by the booze comes a great generosity of feeling, a celebration of love in all its forms, not least between two friends old enough to know better.
Narrowly focused but deceptively complex ... tender, relatable scenes take up fewer pages than Davy’s ramblings, but they form the heart of the book. They also raise a timeless question: What do faltering relationships tell us about those that endure? A lot more than we might realize, according to this subtle, observant novel.
Among the personality traits long associated with the Irish is a gift for the art of conversation. Who better to take advantage of that gift than veteran novelist Roddy Doyle, as he does to full effect in his appealing novel, Love? ... [Doyle] follows two middle-aged men as they traverse the subjects of romance, fidelity, longing, regret and the tug of memory in a torrent of insightful, wistful, frequently bawdy and consistently entertaining talk ... [a] conversational feast ... For two decidedly average characters, Davy and Joe can be bitingly funny ... Doyle eventually wraps all of this conversation into an emotionally affecting climax in the hospice where Davy’s father is spending his final hours, leaving Davy and Joe on a sympathetic, if less than fully resolved, note. It’s both a privilege and a pleasure to pass the hours that flow by quickly in this novel, eavesdropping on the banter of these everymen, and grateful to Roddy Doyle for his skill at making us recognize the universality of their stories in the particularity of their ordinary lives.
... a shaggy dog story that seeks to explore the difficulty of saying goodbye to anything, and the experience of losing things and trying to get them back. Its most profound observation is that the sublime moments of our lives are often mundane, and that mundane moments contain the sublime within them. This is expressed with great skill, as the novel’s two protagonists’ whole lives are revealed through blunted dialogue in one dingy pub after another, over the course of a rambling Dublin evening. In its architecture, the milieu and voice Doyle adopts to tell his story, the novel succeeds in communicating something deeply moving about how shabby and run-down our hopes and fears can seem when we put them into words. However, Love is also an almost perverse and occasionally infuriating exercise, which at times resembles a challenge an exceptionally gifted writer has set himself: can I make a good novel out of a pub bore? ... the majority of the novel is a sustained sequence following two men down the rabbit-hole of drink as one of them tries, less and less successfully, to open up his heart to the other. This is difficult to do and is admirably achieved. But there’s a difference between admirable and enjoyable. There are moments of lyricism ... But the bulk of the book is a dialogue in which two men try and fail to say the same thing, over and over again. Frustratingly, there’s a sense that Doyle is consciously containing his dexterity in doing this ... despite Love’s perverse repetitions, the book does eventually land some of its punches. The mundane in the beautiful, the beautiful in the mundane; the old friend you’ve drifted a thousand miles from but need tonight just as much as he needs you, because both of you knew each other back when life began. The rituals that fortified young men years ago, and must now be re-enacted to keep pain at bay for two men in late middle age. All this matters. Similar ideas are explored to devastating effect in John McGahern’s The Pornographer, without Love’s longeurs and flaws. But a book I wanted to throw across the room 50 pages from the end did, by the time I closed it, leave me sitting silently, thinking back over its story, and over losses of my own.
Doyle has form here; the Booker winner has a string of novels to his name that deal with male camaraderie. In Love, again, he captures this awkward dynamic with precision — and the help of profanities ... also an unapologetically slippery book. Doyle goes to lengths to signpost the unreliability of the friends’ shared memories, the shakiness of Joe’s account of leaving his wife, the pair’s inability to articulate what they think ... The most engaging parts are often the straightforward, nostalgic segments when Davy thinks back to his past...It’s these fleeting anecdotes that stick with you ... Ultimately, it’s a tough feat to pull off a novel about a conversation between two drunk men who can’t put what they’re feeling into words. Doyle manages it as well as anyone could.
Doyle’s latest novel...brilliantly highlights his ear for speech, especially the recursive fluency of inebriation. Narrated by Davy, this novel is a tough and tender celebration of the complexities of authentic friendship, as well as the ephemeral nature of memory
Put two Irish guys behind a pint, get them talking, and let the backstory flow. Kevin Barry did it in Night Boat to Tangier...and now Doyle does the same in this freewheeling tale of longtime mates Joe and Davy, who reconnect in Dublin ... As the two track back through the years of their marriages, a mixture of regret and melancholy permeates what’s both spoken and left unspoken. And, yet, at the end of this long night’s journey into day, we are buoyed against the sadness by what is finally a portrait of love in the face of life.
Doyle perhaps does too good a job of rendering Davy’s frustration. Readers may get exasperated by the circularity of his debate with Joe and their inability to come to a better understanding of each other. It’s a relief when the narrative occasionally turns away from the two men and focuses instead on Faye, Davy’s wife ... Near the end, the narrative takes another sharp turn and propels Davy and Joe to an emotional rendezvous with Davy’s dying father. It’s a satisfying scene in that it finally brings the two men closer, but Davy’s father is barely mentioned in the earlier scenes, and so the novel’s ending doesn’t really fit with the rest of the book. Doyle is clearly trying to say something about the nature of mature love—as opposed to the 'spunk eyes' infatuation of youth—but the message seems muddled ... Despite these flaws, Love has moments of brilliance and is a must-read for Doyle’s fans. In Dublin, even a bad night on the town is still pretty good.
This witty, satisfying novel about male friendship, aging, and guilt from Doyle...dramatizes language’s inadequacies when it comes to affairs of the heart ... Some readers may chafe at Doyle’s leisurely unfolding of the plot, though the two men are nothing if not good company. By closing time, Doyle has focused the novel’s rambling energy into an elegiac and sobering climax. This one is a winner.
Two men walk into a pub, and they drink and talk until they can’t do either for much longer ... Whatever clarity they are finding isn't all that clear to the reader, who is beginning to find their company as exhausting and interminable as they do. It seems that Davy is hiding something, burying something, doing his best to escape something from which there is perhaps no escape. Eventually, they have to leave. By the time the novel belatedly reaches the big reveal, the reader has passed the point of caring.
