The movie of The Commitments completely captures the witty dialogue of the novel, and I was just as smitten with the characters in the book as I was in the movie. Thus, with a bit of hesitation, since I didn't want the novel to be a let down after the movie, nor did I want the novel to make me disappointed in the movie, I picked up the Barrytown Trilogy with the intent of initially just reading The Commitments. Once I started looking at his novels though, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was the mastermind behind The Commitments, a movie I love.
I previously only knew Roddy Doyle through his short stories that are sometimes in the New Yorker, and he had been on my list of authors to look into for some time. The Barrytown Trilogy is a collection of three novels - The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van - which all follow members of the Rabbitte family in their lives in a small town outside of Dublin. There are still the humorous bits but it's the struggle to maintain self-respect in this particular culture and the slow death of a friendship.
The third takes place a few years later and the times have gone downhill. Ignoring the inadequate treatment of that whole situation, this one is crass and hilarious. The pregnancy itself is treated a bit briefly, more a prop for the development of the father character. But the way the father is drawn and colored in! Very sweet. The second - my favorite - focuses on the dad as he deals with his eldest daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy and seemingly just a glancing sweep of the daughter. The first is this chuckling wind-up, not really about the family but following the eldest son who forms a soul band out of the whitest of whities that falls apart due to personalities. Why is that interesting at all? I struggle to write beyond mere summarizations so I get overexcited when I think I recognize the craft in writing. Each book has a different tone, which was interesting to me since the bulk of the story is conveyed in oddly formatted dialogue. This trilogy centers around the Rabbitte family. Lots of Irish slang and written to capture some of the accent.
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