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    Smile: A Novel
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    Smile: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Smile: A Novel
    Audiobook5 hours

    Smile: A Novel

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From the author of the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a bold, haunting novel about the uncertainty of memory and how we contend with the past.

    Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly's for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt comes over and sits down. He seems to know Victor's name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick.

    Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes, too, the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories—of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor's own small claim to fame, as the man who would say the unsayable on the radio. But it's the memories of school, and of one particular brother, that Victor cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.

    Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humor, the superb evocation of adolescence, but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to reevaluate everything you think you remember so clearly.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 17, 2017
    ISBN9780525499558
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Smile

    3.5/5

    61 ratings5 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Ah. Well I thought it showed his two selves. His potential self and how his life might have been had he coped with his abuse as a child (by minimising it). Fitzpatrick was the self totally damaged by the serial abuse. However my reading is too kind to Doyle really because it doesn’t fit the facts. The less charitable reading is that he didn’t quite know how to shape his material. The bits which came to life for me were his school days very early on. His dying dad and his mum were never fully realised. And all the nights of drinking in the pub were repetitive and got nowhere and were peopled with guys who had none of the vitality of Doyle’s menfolk in his early novels. And then what was his whole relationship with Rachel about. Perhaps the nugget at the heart of the book was the image of a guy pretending to be a writer and never actually getting whatever it was he was meant to be writing completed. Hence his reference to the writer in The Shining who just types the same line again and again. I’d have been cross if I’d paid good money for the book. Can you tell I’m writing this from the settee??
    • 5/5
      Roddy Doyle can write. He writes in a way that makes it all look so effortless; dialogue that flows as naturally as though you were overhearing a conversation in a bar, boys in a classroom written so that the reader can see the chalk dust floating in the air and feel the ennui, all without a wasted word or an unnecessary adjective. In Smile, he's a master writing at the top of his game and I didn't even notice it until I read the last paragraph and closed the book.Smile tells the story of Victor Forde who, as the novel opens, is newly single and moving into a flat a few miles from the Dublin neighborhood where he grew up. He's feeling his way into his new life, searching out a pub he can consider his local, meeting an old classmate along the way. Victor remembers his schooldays, where he attended a school run by the Christian Brothers, with fondness, for the most part. But there are darker memories underneath the ones of boys goofing off. He remembers growing up in a home where his father dies in his first year at the school, and he remembers his mother trying to cope. He remembers making a name for himself as an up-and-coming young writer and he remembers meeting Rachel, who will eventually leave him when he's in his fifties, bringing him back to the flat in the building not too far from the sea.
    • 5/5
      A powerful voice in Irish writing returns with an evocative novel illustrating once again the misery, pain and ruined lives caused by the sexual abuse scandal prevalent within the Catholic Church from the 1950's. Victor Forde is now a lone single man who spends part of each day in Donnelly's public house. He makes the acquaintance of Fitzpatrick, who he instantly takes a dislike to. There is something strange and unwarranted about this individual, that wakes some very painful memories in the mind of Forde, and in particular the time he spent as a child within the care of the Christian Brothers. What is astounding and memorable about "Smile" is the author's direct, compelling brutal and unforgivable method of storytelling. This makes me want to revisit classics I read many years ago and in particular The Van and the wonderfully titled Paddy Clarke ha ha. It is so refreshing to read his simple style of prose that forms an instant connection with the reader, and makes him loathe and pity Forde in equal measures. ..." a man of my age going back to some wrinkled version of his childhood. Looking for the girls he'd fancied forty years before"...."I was so bored, so heavy with the physical weight of it, I could have cried"......"Do you want it? No, thanks, I said. It was nice talking to you she said. She died five months later."..."It was the last time I slept in my mother's house and it was the last time I went for pints with the lads. Two of them are dead. I miss them like I miss my father."..... The conclusion of this story was never going to make pleasant reading, it was unforeseen, sudden and yet an apt and fitting ending to a novel that will remain with my for many weeks and months. A monumental achievement and a welcome return to one of Ireland's most talented of writers. Many thanks to Random House uk and netgalley for a gratis copy in exchange for an honest review and that is what I have written.
    • 5/5
      In Smile Roddy Doyle addresses the Catholic abuse scandal. At turns laugh out loud funny, then heartbreaking, this was not a book to take lightly. I didn't find it as rich a read as his historical books, or as evocative of working class community life as his Snapper series, but this seems like small quibbles given what he is doing with this book to speak back to those who question the need to challenge the church on the issue of the abuse of boys by priests, as well as the 'luck' (for want of a better word) of those who were able to put it behind them and live rather than the 'failure' of men who didn't. The final line felt like a blow.
    • 4/5
      This is rather a dark little book from Roddy Doyle. He is famous as the chronicler of life in Dublin, especially nailing characterizations of its denizens. This book centres around just one man but it does expose some of Dublin's secrets.Victor Forde is newly separated from his spouse, Rachel. Victor is a writer but he has never completed the book he said he was going to write decades earlier. When he and Rachel first got together it looked like they were both heading for fame, Rachel as a caterer and businesswoman, Victor as a writer and broadcaster. Along the way, although Rachel became well-known and quite well-off, Victor never achieved the promise he showed initially. Now that Richard is living on his own he has started to frequent a local bar where he drinks one pint slowly and then goes back to his lonely abode. One night a man approaches him and claims that they were in school together. He gives his name as Fitzpatrick but Victor cannot place him. Every few nights Fitzpatrick comes in and talks to Victor and then he introduces Victor to some of the other regulars. Victor still cannot remember him and he doesn't even like him very much. His appearance makes Victor recall his school days in the Christian Brothers school although the memories are not what you could call fond. In fact, Victor was touched inappropriately by the Head Brother, a fact he revealed on radio when he was starting out. Those memories caused Victor to have nightmares and panic attacks but he believes he has put that behind him. Fitzpatrick's references to school are bringing those memories to the foreground. One result of this is that Victor has started to write again. He has also started to drink too much. Victor has to face those memories and maybe that is the role that Fitzpatrick is destined to play.The ending makes the reader question everything that has appeared in the book before. Is Victor Forde an unreliable narrator or does Fitzpatrick make Victor realize things about his life that he has never faced? I am really not sure.