New Yorker Story: Roddy Doyle's "Ash"
This week’s New Yorker story, Roddy Doyle’s “Ash,” reads more like the instructions accompanying a kit than a piece of fiction. Assemble its fragments of dialogue and its (for the most part) short paragraphs of the protagonist’s thoughts and actions as best you can — the proper order has been taken care of, but you must supply the voice and the affect. How better to write about an Irishman with affect issues? About feelings and self-awareness in a culture that (still?) contemns feelings and self-awareness, inducing everyone of the male persuasion to find the lowest livable emotional settings.
That such inhumane self-policing makes you stupid is established right away.
We’ll still be friends, she said.
— Grand, he answered, and then he was walking down a street by himself, before he understood what had happened.
That “what had happened” turns out not to have happened — that Ciara, Kevin’s wife, having assured him that they’ll still be friends after she abandons him (and their two daughters), gets cold feet and comes creeping home — is what happens in “Ash.” The wife does not, in the end, leave her husband. We have no idea why, and, because Ciara is not a particularly attractive person, we don’t much care. We’re happy at the end because little Erica and Wanda won’t be growing up without their Mammy — not yet, anyway.
Most of what intervenes between Ciara’s departure (strung out over several nights) and her return is telephonic communication between Kevin and his brother, Mick. “Kevin was starting to dislike his brother, but this wasn’t a new feeling.” There are no new feelings in this story, which bears a startlingly recent date-stamp: at the end, the volcano in Iceland explodes, grounding all the airplanes in Europe. One can only wonder who was expecting to see his or her own short story published in the May 24 issue, and how he or she has dealt with the rescheduling.
“Ash” is compulsively readable — there’s no denying that. But it is also tripe.