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Summary
Summary
Two old friends reconnect in Dublin for a dramatic, revealing evening of drinking and storytelling in this winning new novel from the author of the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant.
Drinking pals back in their youth, now married and with grown up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he needs to tell Davy, and Davy has a sorrow he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.
Joe has left his wife and family for another woman, Jessica. Davy knows her too, or should - she was the girl of their dreams four decades earlier, the girl with the cello in George's pub. As Joe's story unfolds across Dublin - pint after pint, pub after pub - so too do the memories of what eventually drove Davy from Ireland: his first encounter with Faye, the lively woman who would become his wife; his father's somber disapproval; the pained spaces left behind when a parent dies.
As the two friends try to reconcile their versions of the past over the course of one night, Love offers a delightfully comic yet moving portrait of the many forms love can take throughout our lives.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This witty, satisfying novel about male friendship, aging, and guilt from Doyle (A Star Called Henry) dramatizes language's inadequacies when it comes to affairs of the heart. "The words are letting me down," says Dubliner Joe to Davy, his old friend visiting from England, while telling him that he has left his wife for another woman, Jessica, whom they both briefly adored as young men. Over pints at several pubs, the two 50-something Irishmen get back into their old rhythms and revive, or occasionally reinvent, the past. Joe grasps for the right metaphors or analogies with which to explain his life-altering decision to Davy as much as to himself, "testing the words" for how they sound. Davy, burdened by his own sense of guilt with regard to his rapidly declining father, is at times intrigued, bored, contemptuous, resentful, provoking, or supportive of his friend as Joe circles around his infidelity with an almost Jamesian vagueness. Some readers may chafe at Doyle's leisurely unfolding of the plot, though the two men are nothing if not good company. By closing time, Doyle has focused the novel's rambling energy into an elegiac and sobering climax. This one is a winner. (June)
Guardian Review
Roddy Doyle's new novel is a shaggy dog story that seeks to explore the difficulty of saying goodbye to anything, and the experience of losing things and trying to get them back. Its most profound observation is that the sublime moments of our lives are often mundane, and that mundane moments contain the sublime within them. This is expressed with great skill, as the novel's two protagonists' whole lives are revealed through blunted dialogue in one dingy pub after another, over the course of a rambling Dublin evening. In its architecture, the milieu and voice Doyle adopts to tell his story, the novel succeeds in communicating something deeply moving about how shabby and run-down our hopes and fears can seem when we put them into words. However, Love is also an almost perverse and occasionally infuriating exercise, which at times resembles a challenge an exceptionally gifted writer has set himself: can I make a good novel out of a pub bore? Joe meets Davy for dinner in Dublin. As young men, they were almost "the same man" - drinking partners who discovered the adult world of pubs together and fell in love with the same women, though Joe always had more luck. As adult life took them in different directions - Davy moving to England, Joe staying behind - they maintained a friendship, meeting up whenever Davy came home to drink and talk old times. Those meetings became less frequent as the years went by, though, and it seems to Davy that the two men have less and less in common. On this night, having not seen each other for some time, Joe thinks they're meeting because he needs to tell Davy the story of how he bumped into a woman they were both once in love with, without ever really speaking to her or even, quite possibly, learning her name. He's ended up leaving his wife, Trish, for this woman. Her name turns out to be Jessica. Though Doyle threads in flashbacks contrasting Joe's relationship with Jessica with the story of how Davy fell in love with Faye, the woman who became his wife, the majority of the novel is a sustained sequence following two men down the rabbit-hole of drink as one of them tries, less and less successfully, to open up his heart to the other. This is difficult to do and is admirably achieved. But there's a difference between admirable and enjoyable. There are moments of lyricism - as when Davy recalls the symptoms that led him, a year earlier, to undergo an MRI scan, when he felt as though he was experiencing time as a series of moments rather than a continuous flow. Tellingly, this passage occurs in a flashback sequence, where Doyle gives himself more room to inflect his material and reveal more than just the surface of what's going on. He also writes brilliant comic sketches - Joe's attempt to put his shoes on before telling Trish about Jessica, anticipating that she'll kick him out, is wonderful. But the bulk of the book is a dialogue in which two men try and fail to say the same thing, over and over again. Frustratingly, there's a sense that Doyle is consciously containing his dexterity in doing this - when Joe speaks of filling up with words as he goes through life but knowing that something's still missing, a rare aria among the endless recitative, Davy thinks to himself, "I'd forgotten he spoke like that, that he'd once been capable of speaking like that." And then, as Joe and Davy's night is coming to an end, something changes. Careful hints Doyle has dropped throughout his story that all this talk is really just a front, just a way of not looking at something else, are suddenly stitched together, and the whole performance has to be reinterpreted. The evening that's been endured must now be read as a way of doing and saying anything to avoid embarking on the one thing that has to happen before the night is out. This is a beautifully handled and powerful reveal, and it means that, despite Love's perverse repetitions, the book does eventually land some of its punches. The mundane in the beautiful, the beautiful in the mundane; the old friend you've drifted a thousand miles from but need tonight just as much as he needs you, because both of you knew each other back when life began. The rituals that fortified young men years ago, and must now be re-enacted to keep pain at bay for two men in late middle age. All this matters. Similar ideas are explored to devastating effect in John McGahern's The Pornographer, without Love's longeurs and flaws. But a book I wanted to throw across the room 50 pages from the end did, by the time I closed it, leave me sitting silently, thinking back over its story, and over losses of my own.
Kirkus Review
Two men walk into a pub, and they drink and talk until they can't do either for much longer. Much of Irish novelist Doyle's latest is made up of dialogue, unattributed, as recounted by a man in his late middle age named Davy. He's joined by Joe, a drinking buddy from his Dublin youth, though decades and geography have left some distance between them. Davy and his wife have long lived in England. He returns (alone) to visit his widowed father in Dublin, where Joe still lives. Neither of them drinks much anymore, but now that they're reunited, they decide to do it up like old times. As their talk gets more drunken, sloppier and circular, those old times are very much on Joe's mind, because he recently left his wife for Jessica, a woman he had first met in those long-ago pubs with Davy and hadn't seen for almost four decades. So they talk of who they were and who they are, their marriages and their families, since neither knows the other's much at all. In some ways, they no longer know each other well. Yet they know each other better than anyone else does, as the much younger men they once were. And perhaps still are? As Joe confesses and Davy badgers him, Davy also shares with the reader at least some of what's on his mind: his own marriage and something he doesn't want to share with Joe. He keeps checking his phone for a call that doesn't come. They keep ordering another round, pints that neither of them really wants. "The drink is funny, though, isn't it?" says Joe. "You see things clearly but then you can't get at the words to express them properly." Whatever clarity they are finding isn't all that clear to the reader, who is beginning to find their company as exhausting and interminable as they do. It seems that Davy is hiding something, burying something, doing his best to escape something from which there is perhaps no escape. Eventually, they have to leave. By the time the novel belatedly reaches the big reveal, the reader has passed the point of caring. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Put two Irish guys behind a pint, get them talking, and let the backstory flow. Kevin Barry did it in Night Boat to Tangier (2019), and now Doyle does the same in this freewheeling tale of longtime mates Joe and Davy, who reconnect in Dublin--Davy having moved to England decades ago--for what starts out to be a quick drink but quickly evolves into an epic pub crawl in which grievances are aired and the deep-seated affection between the two gradually works its way to the surface, rising through the foam as pint follows pint. We learn that Davy is in Ireland to care for his dying father, and Joe has left his wife for another woman, "the girl with the cello," whom both men encountered and lusted after years before. As the two track back through the years of their marriages, a mixture of regret and melancholy permeates what's both spoken and left unspoken. And, yet, at the end of this long night's journey into day, we are buoyed against the sadness by what is finally a portrait of love in the face of life.
Library Journal Review
In this latest from Booker Prize winner Doyle, two longtime friends sit drinking in a Dublin pub. They rarely see each other anymore, but Davy has come over from England to tend to the dying father whose disapproval he fled, while Joe has recently left his wife and children for the golden girl the two men dreamed of in their youth. Carousing, heartbreak, and an indelible portrait of Dublin.