SOURCE: Skloot, Floyd. “Irish Myth-Making and Myth-Breaking.” Sewanee Review 107, no. 4 (fall 1999): c-civ.

In the following review, Skloot applauds the historical insight Doyle provides in A Star Called Henry, the first of a projected trilogy set in nineteenth-century Ireland.

The Irish novelist Roddy Doyle has been popular and controversial long enough that it can be difficult to believe he is only forty-one. Each novel in his best-selling Barrytown Trilogy, The Commitments (1989), The Snapper (1990), and The Van (1991), was turned into a film. Then in 1993 Doyle demonstrated his literary cachet by winning a Booker Prize for the moving story of a young boy whose parents are at war with each other, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. According to Joseph O'Connor, Doyle's fellow novelist and a noted Irish cultural commentator, that novel's sales were such that the publisher “stopped selling it to human beings. … They've all bought it. We're going to have...