A novel of hauntings ... There is lightness here, too — lightness and humor. Gulls make a frequent appearance, symbols of independence ... Doyle is superb at channeling Paula’s interior voice: witty, cranky, desperately honest. The dialogue is spot-on.
I don’t want to hear from a man writing in the voice of a battered, alcoholic older woman (a well-worn template of female suffering). I just don’t ... The good news for Doyle is that I read his new Paula Spencer novel, The Women Behind the Door, anyway. And that he’s excellent at capturing the kind of tension I’m describing and the fraught stories we tell about ourselves as a result ... There’s much to admire here. And for Doyle fans, the novel will feel familiar: It is unflinching and dark, brutal in its economy, wry and mostly devastating.
The women...are so flawed: bruised, crass, guilt-ridden, incontinent, self-centered, blunt to a fault, furious at themselves and each other and the world. And they are such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising ... A story about the tragedy of resilience. It’s wonderful that Paula has made it to this late chapter, in which a kind of fulfillment has finally appeared to be briefly at hand ... In Doyle’s crisp, wry language, the story of that pain is just the story of life, along with all its small moments of levity and unexpected connection.
The novel remains deep inside Paula’s mind — and brilliantly so. It’s famously hard to work out how you form your thoughts, because the sudden self-consciousness gets in the way. Yet I’m willing to bet that what goes on in most of our heads is beautifully captured here ... Paula constantly shifts backwards and forwards in time, remembering — or imagining — conversations with people from all eras of her life ... Doyle pulls off the virtuoso trick of paying full, convincing justice to the wild disorderliness of Paula’s thoughts without making them difficult to follow, or drawing attention to his own virtuosity.
Interested in the theatre of domestic space, what happens behind the closed doors ... The book deals with hard times and dark matters, but there’s always light in the writing.
Readers familiar with Doyle's past novels won't be surprised by the cheerfully profane dialogue and zippy vernacular on every page of this emotionally resonant work.
Doyle is superb at channeling Paula’s interior voice: witty, cranky, desperately honest. The dialogue is spot-on — the easy, funny banter between Paula and Mary serving as counterpoint to the tortured start-stop conversations between Nicola and Paula. Every word of this book rings true.
