Roddy Doyle: Raining on the Parade

From The Commitments and the Booker Prize-winning “”Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,”” to “”The Woman Who Walked into Walls”” and “”A Star Called Henry,”” it could be argued that Roddy Doyle is the most successful and popular Irish writer of the 1990s. However, his popularity and perceived anti-intellectual thrust have caused many critics to refuse to recognize him as “”literary.”” This book argues that Doyle’s representation of working-class Dublin has broken with the traditional literary view of the Irish as a homogenous “”people”” and has given voice to a little-heard side of modern Ireland. Doyle is a realistic novelist, a comic social-satirist and, most recently, a brilliantly inventive parodist whose fictions cohere around a single focal the defense of the individual’s struggle to live with dignity and decency in the face of overwhelming odds.