[Doyle] is the Irish master of crumpled hope — and no country provides stiffer competition in that category. His new novel offers a deceptively languid plot laced with menace. Paced more like a short story than a novel, Smile creates contradictory feelings of poignant stagnation and accelerating descent ... This is a performance few writers could carry off: a novel constructed entirely from bar stool chatter and scraps of memory. But you can’t turn away. It’s like watching a building collapse in slow motion ... Doyle draws adolescence with such crisp empathy and humor that Victor’s memories feel as real as photos of your own childhood. His Catholic schooling under the brothers is charged with excitement and the possibility of violence ... as the novel reaches its crescendo, Doyle shatters the natural structure of his narrative and manages to disorient us despite our weary confidence that we know the dimensions of the molestation tale. It’s a daring move, an attempt to trace the penumbra of abuse across a shattered psyche. For one horrible moment, we get a sense of the victim’s unspeakable confusion, the terror that diverts a life and wrecks a mind.
There’s an irony to the title of Roddy Doyle’s 11th novel, in that the book eschews most of his trademark humour and the laughs fall thin on the ground. His darkest and perhaps finest work since The Woman Who Walked Into Doors 20 years ago, Smile combines tropes from the various strands of Doyle’s career – childhood memories from the Barrytown trilogy, middle-aged regrets from The Guts and Bullfighting, pub conversations from Two Pints – and merges them into a unique novel, one that is terribly moving and even, at times, distressing, while saving its greatest surprise until the end ... While Doyle has never been a particularly experimental writer, he takes great risks with his story as the novel progresses. To say more would be to spoil the truly unexpected climax that Smile reaches, but suffice to say that to call this the least Roddyesque of Doyle’s work would be an understatement. There is a brave and complex ending to the novel, one that will leave readers astonished.
Smile sags a little bit in the middle, as Doyle chronicles Victor’s somewhat idealized relationship with Rachel. Though we know it’s destined to end, their romance is a shapely, familiar tale about a poor boy, an underdog, managing to land a beautiful, ambitious and moneyed girl; Doyle gives it a poignant, honeyed glow ... In Fitzpatrick, Doyle has created an extraordinarily creepy antagonist: a bully who plays dumb but always gets under the hero’s skin, a clumsy oaf who nevertheless can disappear like a cat into the darkness. Fitzpatrick’s physical presence is palpable and unsettling, uncanny even ... Smile is something of a departure for Doyle — it’s the closest thing he’s written to a psychological thriller — but it nevertheless showcases his well-loved facility for character and dialogue. His ear and eye are peerless ... The book’s ending, though, is anything but prosaic. It is shocking and disorienting, and literally made me gasp in horror. It does serve to justify and explain some of the roteness of the middle section; nevertheless it’s likely to divide readers.
Smile drifts, as memories do, in a curious spiral motion, picking up a scene, dropping it for another, then returning to the original from a slightly different perspective. The tale it tells is mesmerizing, not the least because of Doyle’s ability to blend humor and horror to remarkable emotional effect ... Fans of The Commitments and The Snapper will find many of the features they love in Smile: Doyle’s magical way with dialogue, his uncanny ability to condense whole paragraphs of description into a single telling phrase ... But Smile is a much darker novel, akin to The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, but, to my taste, much better: deeper, more psychologically astute, more gut-wrenchingly powerful. And that ending. Well, you’ll see what I mean.
Smile is a uniquely difficult book to discuss; its power depends upon Doyle's ability to shock the reader with an escalating series of revelations. These culminate in a twist ending that's almost physically painful to read — the reader is forced to reconsider every sentence that's come before; the effect is dizzying and distressing. Too often, plot twists in novels are unearned, the result of writers who have gotten in over their heads and grasped at whatever deus ex machina came to their minds first. This is not the case with Smile — Doyle isn't in love with his own cleverness; the novel ends where it does because it has to … Smile is a novel that's as original as it is brutal, and as painful as it is necessary.
...[a] swift and devastating tale ... Has anyone written as beautifully as Doyle on how love and violence lean right up against each other in childhood? From the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha to Smile, Doyle’s books bruise and cheer at the same time ... In the present, at the pub, Victor gets to know a group of men like him, a little restless as they enter into what Richard Ford called the Permanent Period. They spend their time drinking, and when they begin slagging him off, Victor knows he’s OK. 'I was still one of them — just about.' It’s those last words, so masterfully deployed, which give you a clue as to the dark place this book will visit. The evolution is so swift you feel pushed along by a ghostly hand. In its closing pages, Smile — which has given us a life, fully lived, a life of love and music, and warmth — rips that life straight from our hands. Would that it felt more like fiction.
Smile is a Trojan Horse. The tale of how a man got on with his life after an abusive childhood, in part by laughing at it, is a disguise: Doyle’s tactic is to puncture the comedy of Irish storytelling and show that it can camouflage horrific histories ...great strengths of his writing, however, are put under pressure here by a huge reversal that occurs in the last pages of the novel...a subtle excavation of a repressed consciousness suddenly employs the pyrotechnics of Gone Girl-type thrillers, praised for their unexpected twists ... A narrative explosion that burns so brightly also scorches much of value. The only reason one rereads a novel with such a twist is to ascertain that it makes sense.
There’s very little if anything to say about Doyle’s writing, line by line. I mean that as a compliment. It does exactly what it needs to do without ostentation. I’m not sure I spotted a single metaphor or simile between the first page and the last. Doyle says what’s happening, without fuss and in the plainest language possible. His command of voice is absolutely sure, his dialogue authentic and the Ireland his characters inhabit — still a patchwork of fifties pietism and noughties cosmopolitanism — completely available to his and the reader’s understanding. What’s hinky in the book — the nagging sense that there’s something we’re not being told; something that Victor is concealing from himself — is thoroughly dispatched in the closing pages; a reveal I can’t discuss without giving spoilers to an absorbing and expertly told story. That said, a book of such unshowy accomplishment doesn’t necessarily need the showy twist that Doyle offers at the end. There are readers who will see it coming (I did, a bit); and what magicians call 'the prestige' that caps off a trick, here, is less impressive than the long skilful misdirecting patter routine that precedes it.
His stories, from short fiction to novels, are tightly wound coils of energy, humor and insight, waiting to spring on us. Smile is another stellar example of Doyle’s brand of dense, kinetic storytelling. In just over 200 pages, Doyle manages to tell us something startling, funny and strange about the nature of human tragedy and pain ... Doyle has a particular talent for humor and dialogue, but he also has the rare quality of being able to balance an economy of language with a dense sense of perception. Not a word is wasted here, and there aren’t many to waste. This is a gift, and it’s one Doyle harnesses with particular power in Smile. This drives the book at an almost fever pitch, practically daring you to turn each page and see what kind of incisive character wisdom he’s about to impart next. By the end, even if you think you know what’s coming, you will be dumbstruck by the storytelling prowess at work. Smile is a brief, brilliant, frenzied reading experience that only Roddy Doyle could deliver.
It all makes for a good story, a convincing portrait of a middle-aged man enduring a rough patch after years of riding high. But worming through it are disturbing memories from his schooldays: a flirtatious comment from one of the Brothers who taught his French class, a grope at the hands of the wrestling instructor. Victor shrugs these things off, but gradually 'the lies, the gaps, the facts, the bits of my life' that he’s omitted come tumbling out. Mr. Doyle’s signature clipped dialogue is still a feature of Smile, but this short, effective novel is about the truths that emerge when, despite himself, Victor lets himself talk.
No one familiar with Roddy Doyle’s work will be surprised that Smile, his 12th novel, opens in a Dublin pub, and not the type that the Irish Tourist Board will be featuring in their pamphlets any time soon ...early scenes demonstrate Doyle’s gift for capturing the witty and often cruel banter that animates Irish pub talk, where every compliment hides a hidden barb and every put-down seals an unspoken social bond ...novel elegantly shifts into a prolonged reflection on the misfortunes and failures of nerve that led Victor to this impasse ...a violent, dreamlike finale that will send many readers back to the novel’s first page to reassess everything they’ve read ... Only such confrontational force and honesty, Doyle is suggesting, can break the spell of bravado and willed forgetting that is the true cultural heritage of the Irish.
...Doyle’s new novel, Smile, is a taut and somber novel about a subject that’s usually treated lightly and satirically — the midlife crisis ...a story with a twist, and part of the reason the twist gets over is because we’ve been trained not to take characters like its narrator very seriously ...less a midlife-crisis story than a return-of-the-repressed story, and for such a short novel there are miles of geologic strata between who Victor is and what he’s trying to avoid ... Smile is a remarkable feat of characterization for Doyle... As ever, he delivers his characters best through dialogue, where the profane, pint-soaked bantering exposes how we try to make sense of the harshness of the world while at the same time keeping it at bay ...the heartbreaking core of the book — what it means to be a man, and how much pretending happens in the name of calling yourself one.
Doyle flavors a compelling character study with a soupçon of suspense, misdirecting readers for a powerful purpose that is only revealed at the shocking, emotionally charged ending.
Smile is Doyle’s 11th novel; it deals with physical and sexual abuse of teen boys in the 1970s by Christian Brothers instructors ... It’s the bittersweet best of Roddy Doyle, funny and true ...there’s a darkness and twist to Smile that shows Doyle capable of new tricks ...at the book’s end, readers will have to recalibrate both what they’ve just read and the extended reach of Doyle’s dependable talents ...is no easy maneuver: tackling a sensitive subject with the grace and gravity it deserves, and freshly delivering what readers expect in Doyle’s fiction (wit, dialogue, and the accuracy of youth).
A return to form for the Dublin novelist ... After hitting his peak renown a couple of decades ago, Doyle has sometimes seemed to be drifting on autopilot. Not here, where the first-person narrative is fresh and bracing from Page 1 ... It isn’t until the final pages that the reader understands just what Doyle has done, and it might take a rereading to appreciate just how well he has done it. The understatement of the narrative makes the climax all the more devastating.
A revelation brings the relationship between Victor and Fitzpatrick to a violent conclusion, leading to an ambiguous twist ending sure to spark debate in readers. Doyle skillfully depicts the triumphs and tragedies of the everyday, how the aging process humbles and ennobles, and how a single hasty decision made in one’s youth can define and destroy a mind and thus a life.
