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Life Without Children by Roddy Doyle review – stories about lockdown and loss

Tender and humorous tales explore our need for connections with others in a world made strange by Covid

As a writer who has documented Ireland’s financial and social rollercoaster since the late 1980s, it’s fitting that Roddy Doyle should be among the first to record the effects of the current pandemic, the lockdown and the loss. The 10 stories in Life Without Children, mostly written in the past year, all do that. But Doyle is an author best known for easy dialogues, big, raucous families and pubs – and there have been precious few of those. How will he handle the sudden lack of conversation and company that has characterised recent times? Will there be Zoom calls?

There is one – a frustrating connection with a much-loved wife on an iPad propped up awkwardly in her hospital bed. It’s one of many images that would have seemed nonsensical two years ago but are uncomfortably familiar now: discarded surgical masks stuck to wet pavements; the “new language” of statistics on the radio; “the zip on a body bag”. In this strange new world, “social distancing is a phrase that everyone understands. It’s like gender fluidity and sustainable development. They’re using the words like they’ve been translated from Irish, in the air since before the English invaded.” But what feels most familiar is the sense of absence that fills every story, of voices and bodies and people who are missed.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BhICMJ
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