The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

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