“The lounge boy tried to get everything off the tray all at once so he could get the fuck out of that corner.”
Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper reads as if it must have been a joy to write. It probably wasn’t — most novels are written in a steady drizzle of self-doubt punctuated by lightning storms of megalomania. But listen to how confidently — how freely, how much like an unleashed dog delighting in its own speed — this one opens:
—You’re wha’? said Jimmy Rabbitte Sr.
He said it loudly.
—You heard me, said Sharon.
Jimmy Jr was upstairs in the boys’ room doing his D.J. practice. Darren was in the front room watching Police Academy II on the video. Les was out. Tracy and Linda, the twins, were in the front room annoying Darren. Veronica, Mrs Rabbitte, was sitting opposite Jimmy Sr at the kitchen table.
Sharon was pregnant and she’d just told her father that she thought she was. She’d told her mother earlier, before the dinner.
—Oh—my Jaysis, said Jimmy Sr.
This is the sound a writer makes when no one is looking over his shoulder. The ordinary considerations (Is it OK to mention Police Academy II in a literary novel? Can the reader digest this many names? Can I really get away with ending a sentence with the word was?) fall away. The traffic lights turn green as if in response to the writer’s gas pedal.
But the strange thing about The Snapper — which doesn’t slow down or tense up for the entirety of its two hundred and eighteen pages — is that it is no mere joyride. It has thematic heft of a sort that one tends to associate with ponderousness, with epigraphs from Milton, with untranslated French dialogue. You could, assuming your teacher had a high tolerance for profanity, write a term paper about it. How did Doyle manage that?
The book’s about the pregnancy of a twenty-year-old Dubliner named Sharon. She won’t tell anyone who the father is, and she and her noisy, loving family fumble through the social opprobrium — the jokes at the pub, the snickers at work, the relentless rumors. (Pregnancy is, incidentally, an underutilized spine for a novel. Create a ticking clock, say the writing gurus. Witness this time-bomb with a nine-month-fuse, says Mother Nature.)
I was so engrossed by the story, so enamored with the language, that it wasn’t until two thirds of the way through that I thought: wait a minute, is Doyle retelling the virgin birth? And would that make Sharon’s belching, belligerent father, Jimmy Sr.…God?
And the truth is, I’m still not sure. It’s to Doyle’s great credit that he allows the significance to accumulate naturally, like the burrs in a dog’s coat after a romp in the woods. Lesser writers spend all their energy attempting to formulate burrs in a lab (just a few more hooks here), leaving the woods untouched.
A quarter of the way into the book Sharon is sitting around the pub with her friends Jackie, Yvonne, and Mary, working up the nerve to tell them that she’s pregnant. They’re licking potato chip crumbs off their fingers, telling stories about their exes, and throwing back vodkas. (Roddy Doyle was way ahead of Emily Oster when it comes to drinking during pregnancy). A teenage server — we only ever know him as “the lounge boy” — is bringing their drinks, and they are drunkenly, half-jokingly sizing him up.
—He’ll be nice when he’s older, won’t he? said Mary.
—Who? The lounge boy?
Jackie looked over at him.
—He’s a bit miserable lookin’.
—He’s a nice little arse on him all the same, said Yvonne.
Finally Sharon tells them her news — and we watch as the chaotic, fluid organism that is this group of friends adapts to this information. They try out earnestness (“— Well done, Sharon.”) Then jokiness (“No fellas’ll come near us if one of us is pregnant.”) And finally, with relief, they remember the lounge boy — the perfect outlet for the stray energy and uneasiness that’s coursing through them (Sharon won’t even tell them if the guy who knocked her up is married!).
Ordering the next round of vodka and crisps, Mary asks the lounge boy if he has any nuts, and the group screams with laughter. (“—Jesus, Mary, yeh dirty bitch yeh!”) Doyle has pulled off something impressive here — he’s created this audible, practically smellable group of friends, and he’s done so without so much as an introduction or a flicker of physical description. He’s shown, with great sensitivity, how such a group might regain its equilibrium after a seismic event. But he isn’t finished.
Because the lounge boy is not just an extra on Doyle’s call sheet; he’s also a sixteen year old boy. With a family and a history and a limbic system all his own. The lounge boy knows he’s being laughed at, he knows he’s become the object of some dangerous energy — and he still has to bring them their drinks.
“The lounge boy tried to get everything off the tray all at once so he could get the fuck out of that corner.”
This is my favorite sentence in the book — not because it’s so important (we barely see the lounge boy again), but because it’s so scrupulous. Doyle could have gotten away with painting the lounge boy with a smudge for a face. He didn’t need to consider the precise set of feelings and actions with which an uncomfortable teenage boy would respond to being catcalled. But he did consider it — and he animated the sequence, and captured the lounge boy’s tossing-scraps-to-a-ravenous-alligator inner experience, with a single beautifully deployed fuck.
And this, I believe, is why The Snapper, for all its easy delight, has such force. This is why it magnetizes significance to its slender frame. Real meaning, in books — the kind of intricate patterning that seems, to a reader, as if it could only have resulted from obsessive deliberation — is not achievable by direct effort. (Think of Orwell straining to affix his political agenda to the creaky chassis of Animal Farm). Real meaning is the product of — the byproduct of — thousands of nearly invisible decisions, each one given more attention than it probably deserves. Significance is a kind of heavenly reward, bestowed by God or the unconscious in recognition of work that an artist could have gotten away with skipping. The lounge boy is not just a teenager avoiding harassment — he’s a dollar discreetly placed by Doyle in the Church of Literature’s collection plate. We all share in the bounty.