Living with Covid

By Vince Cuddihy

It must be admitted that I am a big fan of Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. I have read most of his adult books, which is something that I can say about very few contemporary writers.  That still leaves his plays and his children’s books, a few of which are available to Lennoxville Library readers via interlibrary loan. With Life without Children (2021), Doyle has returned to short stories. And a very fine collection it is.

For the most part, these are stories about empty nesters, middle-aged Dubliners whose adult children have moved out. But the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic has turned their lives upside down. Many husbands have lost their jobs to lockdowns. Government support programs enable them to meet their financial obligations, but they don’t give the men anything productive to do. Even their usual recreational activities are off limits, as distance rules and quarantine enforcements shut most people off from their habitual amusements. In some cases, the departed children are forced back home like recent graduates swamped by student debt.

My favourite story is The Funeral. The opening paragraph is absolutely brilliant, possibly the best thing Doyle, and perhaps any other writer, has ever written. Bob O’Leary is trying to find an appropriate way to mourn the mother who so resented Bob’s determination to pursue his own path in life over his parents’ objections that she has cut Bob out of her will (and made a point of telling him) and used the Covid emergency to contrive to bar him from her funeral. In the process, Bob is giving a new meaning to the expression “making cold calls”, while at the same time inventing a new recipe for the traditional Viking coddle. 

Another story that gave me a big kick was Worms. Joe has been laid off and starts to notice that the same song runs through his head whenever he shaves. He and Thelma start to research the song in an effort to find the version he is hearing. (How they missed finding Glen Campbell’s rendition of The Whistling Gypsy certainly baffles me.) He starts to make a list of which earworm, as Joe has learned they are called, arrives with which action. (While prepping for my cataract surgery, the Walker Brothers’ hit from 1966 began to whisper, unbidden and unhelpful, in my ear.)

Thelma realizes that she has experienced a similar phenomenon and asks Joe to add her earworms to his list. This becomes a game they both enjoy playing and gives them a fun thing to share without having to leave the house. It also gives Joe a task to work on that he can look forward to while he is laid off from his job.

All this goes out the window when Thelma is struck by Covid-19 and has to be hospitalized. Suddenly, Joe is completely cut off from her: he can’t visit her or see her. He can’t even talk to her on the phone: ventilator tubes put a stop to that. He must depend on his daughter, Aiofe, to provide him with reports on how Thelma is hanging on, based on what little information the doctors give her.

The title story is effectively a comparison between the cloistered life that has been imposed in Ireland and the wide open world of Boris Johnson’s England. An Irish visitor is comparing his own timid behaviour and that of his countrymen with the reckless, maskless, crowded actions of the denizens of Newcastle. Think of the difference between here and what you’ve seen of Florida, and you’ll get the idea of what Doyle is trying to describe.

Gone is a beautifully crafted story. It features a couple, Jim and Laura, who have split up. They have never had children. Doyle alternates between one narrator and the other, so the reader gets a sense of how their differences have driven them apart. One is left with the sense that the two are very compatible and have forced isolation onto themselves for the flimsiest of reasons, and that their loneliness is an undeserved punishment.

There are ten stories in all. There are no losers in this bunch. Some have greater strengths than others, but all are interesting and very well written. I am not sure what significance there is to the fact that both the opening and closing stories feature a pedestrian being run into by a cyclist.  

  Lennoxville Library News

Our Espace Biblio in Square Queen will run  for two more Saturdays before we call it a season. This Saturday, October 8th join us for an engineering activity for kids and adults from 10am-1pm.

Also coming up for kids in October: board game nights, robotics club, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Our annual fundraising campaign “Adopt-a-Book” runs through mid-november. Help us defray the cost of buying new books by making a donation equivalent to the price of an item you choose from our new book display. 

OR support Black Cat Books and the Library at the  same time by purchasing items there from our wish-list.

Donations are tax deductible!