Sevenyears ago I started a post on Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors but never finished it. In light of Rowling mentioning him as her “favorite living author” in the 1998 interview with Jennie Renton, I thought it as good a time as any to finish it up and send it out. I won’t revise the context of my first reading Doyle’s Woman (1996) or the sequel Paula Spencer (2006)– my laborious PhD survey of Rowling’s admitted influences — but I will share more of Rowling’s raves about Roddy. Enjoy!
I’m reading novels recommended by J. K. Rowling this year as part of my research into probable influences on the most important patterns and parodies in her work. I’m learning a lot and I hope you’re enjoying my hurried posts that I make here — on Molesworth, on Lolita and Pale Fire, even Margery Allingham — in the rush after finishing a book lest I forget what excited me about it.
Some authors and books are ones I’ve never heard of, frankly. The Legend of Manon Lescaut? Paul Gallico’s Manxmouse? If Rowling hadn’t said they were important to her, the odds are very good I never would have picked them up (because they’d never crossed my path). Some are books by writers whose work is unappealing to me after I learn about it. Rowling has said Colette is one of her three favorite writers repeatedly and recommended Cheri to readers. Stories about Cougar courtesans in Paris really aren’t my thing.
In that category, too, I confess, has been a book by The Presence’s “favorite contemporary author,” Roddy Doyle. Rowling recommended The Woman Who Walks Into Doors to Oprah Winfrey herself for that personage’s Instant Best Seller Book Club. I’ve had it on my shelf for years and never picked it up. I finished it late last night.
Here are my three best reasons after the jump for thinking you might want to read it, too, for a better understanding of J. K. Rowling and what she’s after in her work.
First, though a quick review of one or two Rowling Raves about Roddy Doyle:
Favorite Living Writer: Roddy Doyle
I love all his books. I often talk about him and Jane Austen in the same breath. I think people are slightly mystified by that because superficially they’re such different writers. But they both have a very unsentimental approach to human nature. They can be profoundly moving without ever becoming mawkish.
J. K. Rowling: Books That Made a Difference
When J. K. Rowling, author of the hugely popular Harry Potter books, came to visit O, The Oprah Magazine last fall, we weren’t sure what to expect. Rowling answered our questions about everyone’s favorite wizard, the magic of reading and her own most-loved books. At the top of her list is The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by acclaimed Irish writer Roddy Doyle. This unflinching novel chronicles a woman’s relationship with a violent man in a way that brings fresh insight to the subject—and, far from being a punishing read, it is surprisingly engaging and uplifting.
O, The Oprah Magazine: Why do you love The Woman Who Walked Into Doors?
J. K. Rowling: It is the most remarkable book. Roddy Doyle gets inside the head of his character so utterly, so completely. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a believable, fully rounded female character from any other heterosexual male writer in any age. I should emphasize that I would feel the same way about the book if it had been written by a woman; I would still think it was the most remarkable achievement. But when I sit back and think, ‘A man wrote this?’—phenomenal. He has created a woman who, you imagine, will go to the bathroom and defecate. He also leaves her with her dignity, even though what she’s going through is a horrific thing. And he does it all in such a subtle way. I do think he’s a genius. His dialogue is irreproachable. And your heart…you’re totally drawn into his books. I’m very passionate about Roddy Doyle, and I’ve never met him, which is a frustration to me.
O: Well, maybe you could now…
JKR: My editor edits Roddy. And I’m always just missing him! But I might freeze, being in the same room.
It doesn’t get more fan-girlish than that, methinks. He’s a genius on par with Jane Austen and his Woman Who Waled Into Doors ” “tops the list” of her “best-loved books.”
I asked a friend in the UK, a successful woman novelist, if she would do a MuggleNet podcast with me to talk about this author and Rowling’s favorite contemporary novel. She read it and wrote me promptly to say, “Count me out.” She thought it was absolutely dreadful and the only book of Rowling’s she thought reflected Doyle’s themes or style was Casual Vacancy, another book my friend said she wouldn’t discuss publicly. Her reason? “If you haven’t got anything nice to say, shut up.”
My first thoughts on reading Woman Who Walked Into Doors seven long years ago were pretty much along those lines as well:
(1) Sorting is a Big Deal in UK and Irish Schools.
Paula Spencer, the titular character, blames the direction of her life on having been placed in 1.6, “nearly the worst, one step above retarded” (39) at St. Mary’s primary school. As she reflects about her behaviors at thirteen:
One thing for certain: I wouldn’t have done it if I’d gone to the Holy Rosary. And I don’t think I’d have done it if I’d been in 1:1. But my name was called out just when it started to rain and I ended up wanking a good-looking thick in the back of the classroom. That was how you made a name for yourself in 1:6. (41)
Sorting is destiny, especially for those who are “sorted too early.”
That may be a stretch for “influence,” but it’s something a Potter-phile would notice.
(2) We Have All the Confirmation We’ll Ever Need of the McCauley ‘Abused Women’ Key to J. K. Rowling
My summary judgement?
Having just finished the novel by Rowling’s “favorite contemporary author” that she recommended to Oprah’s Book Club with a rave, The Woman Who Walks Into Doors by Roddy Doyle, I confess to being astonished and not-at-all surprised by her praise. The story, in capsule form, is a nightmare tale of a Dublin woman, lower middle-class, and her life as woman and mother married to a husband who beats her on a daily basis. Walks Into Doors makes Career of Evil read like Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm. Reading it through to the end is akin to imaginative trauma. Rowling’s Leonora Quine character in Silkworm, the mother of the handicapped Orlando, is a shade in pastels of Paula Spencer in Doors.
(3) “She May Have Studied ‘Classics’ but Her Frame of Reference Tends to Be Populist”
For two hours every week, she’d leave Jessica with a friend and sneak off to a cafe to write. She has never had much time for fantasy, certainly isn’t a buff. “I’ve read The Hobbit, and I read CS Lewi s when I was about eight. But I don’t like fantasy as a genre. Today, people seem to think if there’s a unicorn in a book I will love it, and they give me the books…” Invariably, they are wrong. She would much rather sit down with a good Roddy Doyle. She may have studied classics, but her frame of reference tends to be populist. – Q Magazine, Father Ted, The Royle Family.
Take a look at the GRowling Twitter feed. The negative reader response to her insensitivity to the mentally ill and to those not sharing her fundamentalist faith in the Gods of Liberalism are not the rants of Trumpsters or Harry Haters but fans profoundly disappointed with the (egad) Trump-like careless tweets from their favorite author.
These are the posts of a person living in a social bathyscaphe, inside of which iron bubble the sober, moderating voice of wisdom found in great literature is not heard. Q Magazine ironically called that voice “populist” in contrast with “classics” and I think both the word, even with the meaning it has taken on post Brexit and presidential election, and the contrast are apt.
The Harry Potter books are novels perhaps best understood, if interpreted through the lens of the Personal Heresy, as the work of a battered woman struggling to keep her faith when living in a nightmare existence of dreading the advent of more violence and abuse. Rowling, from this perspective, is Harry Potter, a de facto orphan, green eyes, born on 31 July, raised in a dysfunctional home with a crazy father, and, as Travis Prinzi and I have both written, a Gothic heroine.
Unless we take that absolute position without caveats or apologies, we have set foot upon a road with only one destination,” Rowling said. “If my offended feelings can justify a travel ban on Donald Trump, I have no moral ground on which to argue that those offended by feminism or the fight for transgender rights or universal suffrage should not oppress campaigners for those causes. If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed the line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture, and kill on exactly the same justification.
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