Love

April 6, 2020
This witty, satisfying novel about male friendship, aging, and guilt from Doyle (A Star Called Henry) dramatizes language’s inadequacies when it comes to affairs of the heart. “The words are letting me down,” says Dubliner Joe to Davy, his old friend visiting from England, while telling him that he has left his wife for another woman, Jessica, whom they both briefly adored as young men. Over pints at several pubs, the two 50-something Irishmen get back into their old rhythms and revive, or occasionally reinvent, the past. Joe grasps for the right metaphors or analogies with which to explain his life-altering decision to Davy as much as to himself, “testing the words” for how they sound. Davy, burdened by his own sense of guilt with regard to his rapidly declining father, is at times intrigued, bored, contemptuous, resentful, provoking, or supportive of his friend as Joe circles around his infidelity with an almost Jamesian vagueness. Some readers may chafe at Doyle’s leisurely unfolding of the plot, though the two men are nothing if not good company. By closing time, Doyle has focused the novel’s rambling energy into an elegiac and sobering climax. This one is a winner.

April 15, 2020
Two men walk into a pub, and they drink and talk until they can't do either for much longer. Much of Irish novelist Doyle's latest is made up of dialogue, unattributed, as recounted by a man in his late middle age named Davy. He's joined by Joe, a drinking buddy from his Dublin youth, though decades and geography have left some distance between them. Davy and his wife have long lived in England. He returns (alone) to visit his widowed father in Dublin, where Joe still lives. Neither of them drinks much anymore, but now that they're reunited, they decide to do it up like old times. As their talk gets more drunken, sloppier and circular, those old times are very much on Joe's mind, because he recently left his wife for Jessica, a woman he had first met in those long-ago pubs with Davy and hadn't seen for almost four decades. So they talk of who they were and who they are, their marriages and their families, since neither knows the other's much at all. In some ways, they no longer know each other well. Yet they know each other better than anyone else does, as the much younger men they once were. And perhaps still are? As Joe confesses and Davy badgers him, Davy also shares with the reader at least some of what's on his mind: his own marriage and something he doesn't want to share with Joe. He keeps checking his phone for a call that doesn't come. They keep ordering another round, pints that neither of them really wants. "The drink is funny, though, isn't it?" says Joe. "You see things clearly but then you can't get at the words to express them properly." Whatever clarity they are finding isn't all that clear to the reader, who is beginning to find their company as exhausting and interminable as they do. It seems that Davy is hiding something, burying something, doing his best to escape something from which there is perhaps no escape. Eventually, they have to leave. By the time the novel belatedly reaches the big reveal, the reader has passed the point of caring.

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April 1, 2020
Put two Irish guys behind a pint, get them talking, and let the backstory flow. Kevin Barry did it in Night Boat to Tangier (2019), and now Doyle does the same in this freewheeling tale of longtime mates Joe and Davy, who reconnect in Dublin?Davy having moved to England decades ago?for what starts out to be a quick drink but quickly evolves into an epic pub crawl in which grievances are aired and the deep-seated affection between the two gradually works its way to the surface, rising through the foam as pint follows pint. We learn that Davy is in Ireland to care for his dying father, and Joe has left his wife for another woman, "the girl with the cello," whom both men encountered and lusted after years before. As the two track back through the years of their marriages, a mixture of regret and melancholy permeates what's both spoken and left unspoken. And, yet, at the end of this long night's journey into day, we are buoyed against the sadness by what is finally a portrait of love in the face of life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2020

Dubliners Davy and Joe were boon companions in youth, so alike they sometimes fell in love with the same women. Now Davy lives in England and sees Joe only during visits to his elderly father. One night, Joe and Davy meet over dinner and drinks for old time's sake, and Joe confesses that he's left his wife for a woman he and Davy met over 30 years ago. They spend the evening talking about their lives, sparring about their friendship, and opening old wounds. As they move from one Dublin pub to another, Davy and Joe alternate between resenting each other and reconciling, finally achieving a sort of peace when Davy's ailing father takes a turn for the worst. If this night is the last Davy and Joe see of each other, at least they part as friends. VERDICT Doyle's latest novel (after Smile) brilliantly highlights his ear for speech, especially the recursive fluency of inebriation. Narrated by Davy, this novel is a tough and tender celebration of the complexities of authentic friendship, as well as the ephemeral nature of memory. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2020

In this latest from Booker Prize winner Doyle, two longtime friends sit drinking in a Dublin pub. They rarely see each other anymore, but Davy has come over from England to tend to the dying father whose disapproval he fled, while Joe has recently left his wife and children for the golden girl the two men dreamed of in their youth. Carousing, heartbreak, and an indelible portrait of Dublin.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.