"What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states. That was the way Twain was smart, and Dickens; and that is surely one of the reasons why Roddy Doyle is adored by all sorts of people, many of whom are infrequent book-buyers. It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things."Nick Hornby, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, London: Viking, 2006. 161-162. A review of this book can be found at Reviewing 'The Complete Polysyllabic Spree' by Nick Hornby.
Image: “One of the reasons why Roddy Doyle is adored by all sorts of people…”
Geoff Pound