Among the personality traits long associated with the Irish is a gift for the art of conversation. Who better to take advantage of that gift than veteran novelist Roddy Doyle, as he does to full effect in his appealing novel, LOVE? Over the course of an extended evening and early morning of Dublin pub crawling, he follows two middle-aged men as they traverse the subjects of romance, fidelity, longing, regret and the tug of memory in a torrent of insightful, wistful, frequently bawdy and consistently entertaining talk.

Davy and Joe, Doyle’s garrulous duo, could have stepped right from the pages of one of the tales in his 2011 collection, BULLFIGHTING: Stories. In describing those men in my review, I wrote that they had “reached the broad valley of midlife having played by a set of rules that promised at least contentment, if not happiness, and now feel betrayed by either ennui or strife in their personal relationships, stagnation in their jobs, and a sense that life isn’t destined to improve any time soon.”

"It’s both a privilege and a pleasure to pass the hours that flow by quickly in this novel, eavesdropping on the banter of these everymen, and grateful to Roddy Doyle for his skill at making us recognize the universality of their stories in the particularity of their ordinary lives."

While Joe has spent his nearly six decades of life in Dublin, his friend Davy has lived in England for almost 30 years, returning only to visit his ailing father, whose final illness provides a lovely coda to the reunion of the two lifelong friends. The opening course in this conversational feast is Joe’s revelation that at a parent-teacher conference a year ago, he had encountered a woman named Jessica, whom he and Davy had first admired from afar in a Dublin pub some 37 years earlier. From a kiss in the school’s hallway, Joe and Jessica’s meeting has blossomed into an affair, one that his wife Trish discovers, fittingly, while the two of them are watching the eponymous Showtime series.

Joe’s revelation spurs Davy, who provides the novel’s voice, to reflect on the mixed blessing of his friend’s new attachment and his own long marriage to Faye, a woman who swept him away from his girlfriend, after boldly displaying her interest in him by placing her hand on his leg under the table at the wedding dinner where they met. As the evening passes, Davy experiences successive waves of conflicting emotions --- jealousy, anger and sheer bemusement at the folly of his friend’s late-in-life affair chief among them. “I’d almost been enjoying the car crash --- man meets old flame and ruins his life,” he reflects. And as they amble from pub to pub, imbibing prodigious quantities of pints along the way, these companions are worthy sparring partners in a verbal bout over what it means to be a good man and to live a good life.

But perhaps the most poignant topic in this flood of talk is the subject of memory. The two friends, who have both survived health crises, joust over their clashing recollections of their long-ago encounter with Jessica, while sharing stories about the fragility of memory in their own marriages. Davy remarks on how “Faye says we did something and I haven’t a clue,” while Joe expresses his exasperation over his wife’s appropriation of one of his cherished anecdotes. “It becomes harder to separate wha’ happened from wha’ might’ve happened,” he observes, “an’ wha’ didn’t happen but kind o’ seemed to.”

For two decidedly average characters, Davy and Joe can be bitingly funny. Joe compares the long hiatus in his contacts with Jessica to asbestos, which can “incubate for forty years.” And then there’s the pair’s exchange about the possibility of assisted suicide in Switzerland --- “One last wank an’ then the electric chair, or whatever they use over there,” as Joe bluntly puts it, only to have Davy point out, “An electric chair made in Switzerland would be high-end by the way. Well worth the fare.” When Joe observes that his affair with Jessica “isn’t about two women fightin’ over me or anythin’ like tha’. Or me havin’ the midlife crisis or somethin,” Davy’s one-word reply --- “Midlife?” --- is as devastating as it is swift.

Doyle eventually wraps all of this conversation into an emotionally affecting climax in the hospice where Davy’s father is spending his final hours, leaving Davy and Joe on a sympathetic, if less than fully resolved, note. It’s both a privilege and a pleasure to pass the hours that flow by quickly in this novel, eavesdropping on the banter of these everymen, and grateful to Roddy Doyle for his skill at making us recognize the universality of their stories in the particularity of their ordinary lives.