Here Are the Young Men

April 13, 2015
In Doyle’s highly readable debut novel, three Dublin teenagers grope through the first stages of adulthood during the summer after their high school graduation. Kearney loves trouble and altered states of consciousness; Matthew is a fairly dutiful student and son, taking a job right away at a Shell gas station; Rez is a bit of a dreamer and never seems totally present. It’s 2003, and alcohol, sex, and drugs are on the menu for all three young men. They embark on several adventures, both separately and as a trio. The restless Kearney takes his craziness to Boston, which does not satisfy his wanderlust. For disaffected Matthew, nearly everything is a letdown. He immerses himself in work and turns away from his friends. The imaginative Rez can find neither meaning nor peace in his romance with the withholding Julie or in his intense studying and writing. He slides into depression and attempts suicide. Doyle deftly shuffles the stories of his three lads in short chapters from their various perspectives. But his careful prose often doesn’t match the immediacy and grit of the characters’ crises. And the choice to write only the Matthew chapters in first person throws the books oddly out of balance. Still, a lively debut by a promising young writer.

May 1, 2015
In 2003, amid boom times in Ireland, three teenagers spend the summer high on everything but life in this intense, at times nightmarish, debut. Kearney daydreams of sick bloody mayhem, while bookish Rez sees through every facade to the pointlessness behind. Matthew is desperate for a girlfriend and destined to flop. They're friends who have spent their last school year before college or work making trouble and getting themselves barred from their graduation ceremony. Jobless yet clearly riding the Celtic Tiger, they always have money to finance the "inevitable" idea of getting wasted. Day and night they drink and smoke pot or hash in truly striking quantities, with occasional detours for cocaine or Ecstasy. Vomit and most other bodily emissions are never far away, either from the main characters or any one of the junkies, drunkards, and street people strewn about Dublin's fair city. While there are many darkly comic moments-a junkie's volume of poetry is called "Molesting Your Inner Child"-the book isn't for the squeamish, especially with regard to Kearney's more extreme fantasies and three sickening deaths. The young men's mischief takes an inevitable uglier turn when Kearney's beating of a junkie leads to worse. Doyle's take on the angst and awkward bonding of young males is strong enough that it highlights how little he has on the female side, essentially one solid but unexplored character. Still, he skillfully stokes suspense amid considerable repetition and makes these nasty slackers occasionally even elicit sympathy. He also makes sure they're not stupid, which highlights the fact that their choices are. For many parents this could be an eye-opening, admonitory read-if they aren't as unbelievably blind as the parents in the book. Rough in its language, physical violence, and reminders of youth's potential for anything, the book joins a respectable literary line dating back to A Clockwork Orange, if not Tom Jones and Vanity Fair.

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Starred review from June 1, 2015

Awaiting the results of his Leaving Cert, the final examination in the Irish secondary school system, Matthew Connelly anticipates a summer of knocking about Dublin with his mates: philosophical Rez, amiable Cocker, and twitchy Kearney. If he's lucky, he might get together with the gorgeous, college-bound Jen. But Matthew's parents insist that he find a job and plan for the future. Undeterred, Matthew and his friends seek oblivion in drink and drugs, with Kearney on a quest for sensory stimulation that further blurs the boundaries between reality and the insidious imaginative space he crams with violent video games, atrocities on the nightly news, and pornography. A visit to the United States further pushes Kearney to extremes that shock his spaced-out friends to take action that is troubling and ultimately ambiguous. VERDICT Recalling Irvine Welsh's work, especially Glue, and Niall Griffith's Grits, Doyle's brutal debut takes place in 2003, when Ireland was poised for economic recovery after the demise of the Celtic Tiger. It paints a stark picture of middle-class youth unable to articulate why the unimpaired life is not worth living.--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

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