Booker Prize-winning Irishman Roddy Doyle finds humor and pain in ‘The Women Behind the Door’

At the end of Roddy Doyle’s novel of domestic violence, “The Woman Who Walked into Doors” (1996), Paula Spencer finally fights back after decades of physical abuse, braining her husband Charlo with a frying pan when she sees him looking “that way” at their daughter, Nicola.

“My finest hour,” she said. She couldn’t fight Charlo on her own behalf, but she found that she could fight him on behalf of her child.

And now it is 25 years later, COVID-19 and lockdown have swept Ireland, Charlo is long dead and Paula is doing well. In “The Women Behind the Door,” the third in Doyle’s Paula Spencer trilogy (the middle novel is called, simply, “Paula Spencer”), she is in her mid-60s and hasn’t had a drink in years.

She’s moved from cleaning offices at night to working at a dry cleaner’s during the day. Her four children are grown and gone, she has a friend named Mary and a sometimes-boyfriend named Joe who laughs at her jokes.

She is particularly proud of Nicola, her eldest, the “goddess,” the achiever. “At her lowest ebb, Paula can look at Nicola and think to herself, Not everything’s been a disaster.”

That’s a clue that disaster will hit, and it does. On the day that Paula comes home from a giddy outing with Mary, Nicola shows up at her front door, catatonic. She has left her husband and children. She’s moving back home.

What happened? It’s a question that takes the entire novel to answer, and the journey is filled with anguish, tempered by wisdom and humor.

“The Women Behind the Door” is a novel of hauntings — Charlo’s voice is in Paula’s head, though he’s been dead for decades. Alcohol is never far from her thoughts, though she no longer drinks. The past swims through her brain: memories of beatings and benders, weeping children, money spent on vodka instead of food. And guilt. Oh, the guilt. The shame.

It was Nicola who watched what happened back then, cleaned up her mother’s vomit and blood, took care of Paula instead of the other way round. And other things happened, things Paula did not witness because she was passed out. Those other things haunt Nicola.

The door in the title is the door to Paula’s house, a door she hates because it trapped her for so long. But it is also symbolic of secrets, trauma and the inability to talk: She and Nicola are behind a door of silence.

There is lightness here, too — lightness and humor. Gulls make a frequent appearance, symbols of independence. In a set piece at the center of the book, however, Paula walks to Dublin’s city center and finds a dead gull on the ground — a dark reminder of what she could have been and must still fight not to become.

Doyle is superb at channeling Paula’s interior voice: witty, cranky, desperately honest. The dialogue is spot-on — the easy, funny banter between Paula and Mary serving as counterpoint to the tortured start-stop conversations between Nicola and Paula. Every word of this book rings true.

Kicking Charlo out that door was Paula’s first, necessary step toward reclaiming her life. Quitting drinking was the second. But as the repercussions from those violent years still thrum 25 years on, she realizes it will take more than just time to wrest open that door and let in light and air for good.

Laurie Hertzel also reviews for the Washington Post and other outlets. She lives in St. Paul.

The Women Behind the Door

By: Roddy Doyle.

Publisher: Viking, 272 pages, $29.