The Fiction of Roddy Doyle

Abstract

Roddy Doyle is quite conceivably the most successful contemporary novelist of his generation. Recently Gerry Smyth, in a study on “the New Irish Fiction”’ that groans under its prodigious weight of colonial and de-colonial theorising, assigned Doyle the central role within the context of the fiction produced in Ireland during the last two decades. “Roddy Doyle”, Smyth remarks, is “one of the key modern Irish novelists” (p. 65). Perhaps that is correct. The question, though, is: key to what? “Doyle’s work is given a central place here”, Smyth suggests as if in answer to our question, “not on grounds of artistic value, commercial success or thematic typicality, although it could be argued that he rates highly on all three of these criteria” (p. 65). One must most energetically beg to differ with respect to the last part of this sentence.