Doyle’s troubled characters have become ghosts in their own lives
Now in his early 50s, Roddy Doyle’s approach to middle age is partly investigative and partly philosophical. The protagonists of his new collection of stories, are all men with more days behind them than before them, men striving to find meaning in shrunken worlds of empty nests and withered marriages.
“Middle age and the autumn years were modern concepts,” we’re told, notions which the brains of Doyle’s characters understand even if their biology — their manhood — does not.
