The Guts - Softcover

Doyle, Roddy

3.76

2,550 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143126091 ISBN 13: 9780143126096

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 2015

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Jimmy Rabbitte of The Commitments returns in the triumphant new novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

Watch for Roddy Doyle's new novel, Smile, coming in October of 2017

Full of the great joy in storytelling that characterizes Roddy Doyle's novels, The Guts catches up with Jimmy Rabbitte--the man who in the 1980s formed the Commitments, a band composed of working-class Irish youths whose mission was to bring soul music to Dublin. Jimmy is now
forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids . . . and colon cancer. The news leaves him shattered and frightened--he isn't dying, he thinks, but he might be. As he battles his illness while running a small music business, he runs into former bandmates, reunites with his brother, and decides to live more in the moment. The Guts is a warm, funny novel about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life.

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Review:

"Doyle's Jimmy Rabbitte reappears, dealing with cancer, mortality, and love. . . . I was undone by the emotional clarity of the writing itself, and by the calm, but never static, way Doyle has of presenting a scene."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Quintessential Doyle. . . . both laugh-out-loud funny and disarmingly moving . . . [It] contains some of the snappiest, wittiest, most believable, and exhilarating dialogue in fiction. . . . To make a story about middle-aged men battling cancer a largely effervescent lark without a trace of sentimentality is a notable achievement."
--The Boston Globe
"Roddy Doyle is a great master of dialogue, which is his narrative medium-- the main way he tells. And it's impossible for anyone, I would think, not to laugh out loud at the wit and shock of it. . . . If [The Guts] has a unifying theme, it is the awareness of death, and the fresh perspective on life thrown by its advancing shadow."
--The New York Review of Books
"Doyle's collected works are a superlative study of family, aging, and the dignity of the working class--and his latest novel is a worthy addition. . . . The novel revisits an area Doyle explored previously in The Van what it means to be a man at middle age."
--The Atlantic

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