New Yorker Fiction Review #258: "Life Without Children" by Roddy Doyle

 

Review of the short story from the Oct. 19, 2020 issue of The New Yorker...

This short story is just a fun, light snack from Roddy Doyle, an author whose long-form fiction I've never read but whose short fiction I've come to enjoy over the past five or six years I've been doing this. Roddy Doyle writes, mostly, about the domestic life -- families, parents, children, dogs, etc -- and the tensions wrought by people who live together and love each other, over many many years. He usually does so in a fairly light-hearted way (I have never read a Roddy Doyle tragedy story, I don't think), and thus his stuff is fun and easy to read. In other words, he's just a good writer who has found his material. 

The actual meat of this story is one night in the life of "Alan" a man entering late-middle age, who goes out one night on a work trip, during the early days of COVID, and fantasizes a life in which he is not the father of a few 20-something kids, does not have a wife, and can go and do whatever he wants without responsibility. Predictably for a Roddy Doyle story, in the end Alan pulls back from the brink -- as most of us probably would -- and returns to the path he was on (his life)...but not before chucking his cell phone, endorsing BrewDog brewery twice (product placements in literature? Oh please lord no...), finding himself in the midst of a pack of drunken, horny middle-aged women, and satisfying some deep inner need to feel like -- even for a moment -- we could have had another type of life if we'd wanted to. 

This is an example of a COVID story that's not really about COVID, but uses the pandemic successfully as a backdrop. The story is about identity -- who we are and who we are not -- and about feeling trapped in ones skin, especially toward the end or at least the last third of ones life. How much can we actually change? How much of our lives was brought about by chance? It's clear Alan is grappling with some of these questions, and the dislocation of COVID allows him to indulge in exploring them a bit more than would the normal course of pre-COVID life. 

Roddy Doyle's book Love just came out this year and I would suspect, based on the tagline, some of these similar questions get explored in its pages.