The Woman Who Walked into Doors.

I have read each of Roddy Doyle's novels (The Commitments [1988], The Snapper [1990], The Van [1991], and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha [1993]) with increasing enjoyment and admiration, so it is with real disappointment that I must report that in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Doyle reaches the limits of his technique.

The topic of the novel commands the reader's attention: thirty-nine-year-old Paula Spencer, a working-class Irish-woman, recalls as much as she can about eighteen years of abuse at the hands of her husband Charlo. Doyle does not make Paula a cut-out martyr: she struggles with alcoholism; she continues to find her brutal spouse sexually attractive despite his repeated attacks on her. Doyle indicts the doctors, nurses, neighbors, and family members who accept Paula's lame excuses, the "walking into doors" of the title, but he does not entirely exonerate his protagonist of a dangerous reticence. Indeed, the reader may wonder why it takes her so long to pick up the frying pan. The somewhat sensational fate of Charlo, killed by the police as he ineffectually flees a murder-scene, Doyle handles without melodrama. Yet the deliberately disordered storytelling, jumbled up to mimic Paula,s patchy memory, the repetitions, and the unvaried rhythm of the prose make a novel that ought to be riveting into a boring book. I find it strange to be bored by a novel about pain, especially since the story Doyle tells contributes to the exposure of the scandalous epidemic of violence against women.

Paula's voice, in which the entire novel is related, combines convincing staccato storytelling, slangy working-class diction, frank revelations, and agonized reconstruction of the past in sometimes profane and often touching tones. Here Paula remembers her teenaged self, both attracted and repelled by the man she will so disastrously marry:

He was a ride. It was the best way to describe him, from the first time I heard of him to the last time I saw him. He wasn't,t gorgeous. There was never anything gorgeous about him. When we made love the first time in the field when we were drunk, especially me, and I didn't really know what was happening, only his weight and wanting to get sick@ I felt terrible after it, scared and soggy, guilty and sore. It would have helped if he'd been gorgeous, like Robert Redford or Lee Majors. They'd have picked me up and carried me home, they wouldn't have fucked me in a field in the first place, not one of the fields where I came from that weren't really fields at all, just bits left over after the building was finished. Charlo stood up. - Fuckin, cold.

I do not doubt the authenticity of this voice, and I admire the evocation of poverty not only in the setting - the left-over fields - and in the man's callous remark, but in the woman's denuded vocabulary of desire: he's a "ride," he's not "gorgeous." In the ensuing sections Doyle succeeds in showing the gradual increase in Paula's realism about her husband, as she ceases to "make him nice" retroactively. The terse concluding remarks of the novel, after Paula has finally driven Charlo out of the house, represent a triumph: "It was a great feeling. I'd done something good."

Perhaps because for the first time in this novel Doyle limits himself to a woman's perspective, critics have celebrated his taking "a daring step in a new direction," as the publicity for the novel cheers. (Doyle's success with a woman's voice will not surprise readers who recall the pungent utterances of Sharon in The Barrytown Trilogy.) Yet I think that in The Woman Who Walked into Doors Doyle takes his customary radical limitation of perspective in a rather more predictable direction, one that ultimately hinders the effect of the book. Doyle's,s early novels rely very heavily on pure scene, in which dialogue rather than inner thoughts dominates. The Commitments reads almost like screenplay. (Perhaps for this reason it is an example of that rare phenomenon a novel improved by being rendered in film - in Alan Parker's 1991 movie of the same title.) The Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha explore with remarkable subtlety the development of a small boys interiority and empathy, as he simultaneously masters language and discovers a new understanding of pain. Paddy's experience of pain becomes more complex as the inevitable break-up of his parents grows nearer, and he gains the capacity to imagine, rather than simply enjoy what he calls "the crunch of someone else's pain." A turning point in the novel occurs when Paddy overhears his father slapping his mother; that single off-stage blow oddly seems more painful to this reader than the horrific catalog of injuries in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. In Paddy Clarke, the rigorous confinement of the fiction to the child's mind and voice works because he is both victim and witness, and because the reader can always see a bit more rapidly than he does what the signs and portents Paddy records really mean. This gives the novel a sense of foreboding that The Woman Who Walked into Doors entirely lacks.

Paula Spencer is a trickier kind of witness: one who has blacked out and been knocked unconscious too often to tell her story straight." Unlike Paddy Clarke, she has no special affinity for language. That limitation of perspective means that we cannot see what the doctors, nurses, and relatives see, or fail to register. Further, it means that Charlo remains just as much a cipher to us as he is to his wife, who, after battering him with a frying pan, still registers his charms: "His hair hung over his face and for a second he looked funny and lovely."

The impoverished explanation for Paula's over-long patience with her abuser is twinned in the novel by a complete lack of interest in Charlo's motivations. All we know is that he's great in the sack (he improves after that first encounter in the fields), that he drinks, and that he comes from an abusive family himself. Though these bare facts may agree with the sociological picture of an abuser, they do little to augment Doyle's detailed choreography of the method of Charlo's beatings. He hits her. He hits her and kicks her. He hits her and knocks her teeth out. And so forth. The resulting monotony of action poses a narrative problem that I had always imagined was particular to what my dad calls "shattering-glass epic" movies. They've crashed the elevator, and escaped the bus, so now they have to wreck a subway train! The repetition of action demands an escalation that is distasteful, in this case, to desire. Because Doyle lets us know from the start that Charlo has died, and because he takes care to present his characters and their worsening situation without any glamour, his readers are left with a relatively simple story portraying a victim. Nothing wrong with that. I believed in Paula the imaginary human being enough to feel appalled for her. But as Elaine Scarry observes in The Body in Pain, pain obliterates language. The paucity of Paula's language, a direct consequence of Doyle's rigorous technique, ultimately makes her story tedious to read.