Feckin' grand stuff

So I turned around the other day and realized that Roddy Doyle has become—and I mean quietly, almost out of nowhere—my favorite short story writer on the planet.

Back in the '90s, when I was living in Holland, I had to pay a fortune for English books, but I used to read all his novels. When I moved back to America, I bought A Star Named Henry in hardback without knowing anything about it (that's how much I trusted Doyle), was surprised to find I didn't care for it, and moved on. Writers peak, I figured. This guy peaked. Show me the next guy!

But for the past decade (maybe not even that long), Doyle's been drifting back to me through his short fiction, which he publishes regularly in the New Yorker and McSweeney's. The stories have been uniformly excellent; a few, like "The Dog" or "The Bandstand," take your breath away. Many, although not all, of the stories feature immigrants (from Poland, Nigeria, Rwanda), because the influx of foreigners into Ireland has been one of the two profound transformations in that country over the past decade or so (the other is the head-scratching, and possibly vanishing, turn towards prosperity). The remainder of the stories follow his typical middle-class Dubliners—characters who never telegraph their next move because they don't know it themselves, who drink and fuck and argue without a comeuppance from the author, and who "can't remember life before the children."

Which writer I'm digging these days shouldn't be important to anyone but me, but I bring all this up because, with the exception of a few pieces that found a home in Doyle's lone short fiction collection, The Deportees' Club (2008), this work has never been collected anywhere, so unless you're prone to keeping old magazines around you probably aren't reading any of this stuff. I would guess these stories will eventually fill out a collection or two, but until then, here are the ones I've been able to find online:

"Recuperation" (2003)
"The Joke" (2004)
"The Photograph" (2006)
"Teaching" (2007)
"The Dog" (2007)
"Bullfighting" (2008)
"Sleep" (2008)
"Ash" (2010)

These are all from the New Yorker. His McSweeney's stories are not online, but they were first serialized in the Dublin paper Metro Eireann, on whose site you can find some of them (albeit broken up into weekly chapters).

UPDATE (9/7/10): Well, no sooner do I bet the farm on Doyle than he publishes a new story in the just-out McSweeney's, and it turns out to be a dud. In "Local," Chidimma, a Nigerian immigrant, is recruited by the Fianna Fáil party to run for a council seat. While I'm amused by the way the Minister of Trade and Communications is depicted as an attractive, young-ish woman who has vodka for breakfast and keeps turning up at her recruit's home drunk and sobbing, the story just has too much "you go, girl" sentimentality in its treatment of Chidimma, not to mention a reliance on shtick that, in light of Doyle's usual gravitas, comes across as weirdly flip. In his recent crop of serialized stories, Doyle has literally made things up as he went along; it's an admirable high-wire act. But in this case I think he fell off the damn wire.