Book Reviews
In Fitzpatrick, Doyle has created an extraordinarily creepy antagonist: a bully who plays dumb but always gets under the hero's skin, a clumsy oaf who nevertheless can disappear like a cat into the darkness. Fitzpatrick's physical presence is palpable and unsettling, uncanny even.… Smile is something of a departure for Doyle — it's the closest thing he's written to a psychological thriller — but it nevertheless showcases his well-loved facility for character and dialogue. His ear and eye are peerless.
J. Robert Lennon - New York Times Book Review
The fear of honest disclosure is central to Mr. Doyle’s newest novel, Smile,about the lies men tell to make themselves appear normal.… Mr. Doyle’s signature clipped dialogue is still a feature of Smile, but this short, effective novel is about the truths that emerge when, despite himself, Victor lets himself talk.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Doyle was determined to write a novel that shocked — and succeeded.… This is a performance few writers could carry off: a novel constructed entirely from bar stool chatter and scraps of memory. But you can’t turn away.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Has anyone written as beautifully as Doyle on how love and violence lean right up against each other in childhood?… From the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha to Smile, Doyle’s books bruise and cheer at the same time.
Boston Globe
Doyle's finest work since The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Smile combines tropes from the various strands of Doyle’s career … and merges them into a unique novel, one that is terribly moving.… Like all good literature, [Smile] will inspire debate but also admiration for the courage of a hugely successful writer who refuses to be predictable and uses the novel to challenge both the reader’s sense of ease and the nature of the form itself.
Guardian (UK)
Beautifully written, and beautifully observed.… Reading Smile, one is swept along — as in all Doyle’s novels — by the vibrancy of language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
[A] marvelous novel from this Irish master …in a novel that hinges on the fallibility of memory, a narrator’s misremembering of a crucial point is expected. What is unexpected it quite how far Doyle takes this.… It says a lot about Doyle’s power that he is able to create such an intensely moving book that yet drops so much of itself as it approaches its end.
Spectator (UK)
[Doyle] employs his sly humor and unparalleled ear for banter between convincingly imperfect characters to craft an unsettling work of psychological suspense . . . [an] artful meditation on pain, memory, and how we build the stories of our lives. It is his most powerful and sobering novel since The Woman Who Walked into Doors.
Seattle Times
Smile is no easy maneuver: tackling a sensitive subject with the grace and gravity it deserves, and freshly delivering what readers expect in Doyle’s fiction (wit, dialogue, and the accuracy of youth). That Doyle is also, 30 years in, inventing new ways of storytelling is brave and notable.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Doyle’s command of voice is absolutely sure, his dialogue authentic and the Ireland his characters inhabit — still a patchwork of fifties pietism and noughties cosmopolitanism — completely available to his and the reader’s understanding.… [A]n absorbing and expertly told story.
Financial Times
(Starred review.)Doyle skillfully depicts the triumphs and tragedies of the everyday, how the aging process humbles and ennobles, and how a single hasty decision made in one’s youth can define and destroy a mind and thus a life.
Publishers Weekly
[Doyle’s] masterly language and honesty … [and] ability to convey so much meaning through rapid-fire dialog in the Irish vernacular is unsurpassed.… Readers anticipating Doyle’s trademark wit and warmth will instead encounter a psychological mystery with an enigmatic ending that will have them flipping to the beginning looking for clues.
Library Journal
Doyle flavors a compelling character study with a soupçon of suspense, misdirecting readers for a powerful purpose that is only revealed at the shocking, emotionally charged ending.
Booklist
(Starred review.) The first-person narrative is fresh and bracing from Page 1.… It isn't until the final pages that the reader understands just what Doyle has done, and it might take a rereading to appreciate just how well he has done it. The understatement of the narrative makes the climax all the more devastating.
Kirkus Reviews