Booker-winning Irish writer Doyle tackles the pandemic in ten short stories that reveal how different characters—from an exhausted nurse to a middle-aged man barred from his mother's funeral—deal with love, loss, grief and death during an unprecedented global emergency.
... a quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid ... Lest he be accused of focusing too much on men and their sense of victimhood, the countervailing magnificence of his women is worth noting. Part of Doyle’s genius resides in a kind of bathetic amusement at the follies of his male characters and always it’s the stoical good sense of women that saves the day ... Another of his great strengths is the ability to drop in those little epiphanies that resolve the tension and conflict of a story in a single significant moment ... Doyle breaks our free fall into despair by emphasising the redemptive power of humour, love and the kindness of strangers.
... what feels most familiar is the sense of absence that fills every story, of voices and bodies and people who are missed ... Doyle shows us men who are tired, or hurt, or baffled by the way things have turned out, walking around strange towns looking for things they are never going to find or making up tall tales so they don’t have to face the truth. And Covid doesn’t help ... There are laughs as well, of course, many of them prompted by a sort of gravedigger’s humour ... There are happy endings, too ... Generally, these are rooted in moments of connection, in finding new ways to talk to each other, after everything that has happened. There is dialogue, after all. Even in a pandemic.
The book is small-boned and quiet, lacking some of the life force of Doyle’s other writing, but its atmosphere of desolation has its own kind of dark power, and the resilient wit of the Irish is everywhere ... The prose proceeds without fanfare, as is Doyle’s way, but is infused with unexpressed or diverted emotion that lends it an accumulated charge ... My favorite of the lot is The Charger, which is also the longest and the most developed. (A few of the other stories have a slightly dashed-off quality and can veer into cutesy moments or slightly pasted-on endings ... Admittedly, there is something thin about Life Without Children, a certain degree of repetitive emotions and scenarios — almost a quality of having been written at great speed before time runs out on all of us. But that very thinness seems suited in some way to the unimaginable period of isolation and confinement Doyle is writing about, a period to which he imparts a sense of poignancy and glimpses of happiness, of grief and loss and small moments of connection that make it less surreal and more a part of the daily vicissitudes through which we must make our way, or perish.
