Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy (1987–1991)
JWST383-c01 JWST383-Harte Printer: Yetto Come October 12, 2013 8:52 Trim: 229mm × 152mm Chapter 1 In the Family Way: Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy (1987–1991) I If, as has been claimed, the origins of contemporary Irish drama can be traced to September 28, 1964, the date Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! premiered at Dublin’s Gate Theatre,1 then one might legitimately nominate March 27, 1987, as the inaugurating moment of contemporary Irish fiction, if by “con- temporary” we mean writing that is “characterised by an increasing sense of democratisation, of challenges, from previously marginalised constituencies, to the values and judgements that historically had governed the formation of the literary canon.”2 On that date, a twenty-eight-year-old Dublin schoolteacher named Roddy Doyle published The Commitments, a debut novel that vibrates with the exuberance, enterprise, and humanity of characters previously unheard in Irish fiction: disaffected youths from the impoverished working-class suburbs of 1980s Dublin. Unlike Friel two decades earlier, Doyle could not count on the backing of a major Irish cultural institution to promote his work nor did he have a successful literary apprenticeship behind him. On the contrary, his first novelistic attempt, the unpropitiously titled Your Granny is a Hunger Striker, written during the early 1980s, failed to attract the interest of a single publisher.3 Determined to avoid this fate for his second novel, and in keeping with the entrepreneurial, do-it-yourselfCOPYRIGHTED ethic of the book’s protagonists, MATERIAL Doyle and his friend, John Sutton, decided to bypass the publishing establishment and issue Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007, First Edition.
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