The Deportees

In The Commitments, Roddy Doyle’s comedic, expletive-ridden 1987 novel, disenfranchised white Irish kids come to identify with American soul music and manage to make it their own. The Deportees, a short-story collection set 20 years later, flips that idea in response to the rapidly changing face of Ireland, now a relatively wealthy country and home to thousands of African immigrants. Each of the eight tales collected here touches on what it really means to be Irish today.

Doyle is at his best in “Home to Harlem,” a bittersweet account of young Declan O’Conner’s quest to find evidence of the Harlem Renaissance’s influence on Irish literature. O’Conner—both black and Irish—convinces himself that Beckett never went anywhere without a copy of The Souls of Black Folk and is determined to prove it. Another quality effort is “57% Irish,” in which a man is required to test people’s “Irishness” and comes up with the imaginative solution of measuring individual reactions to Robbie Keane’s goal in the 2002 World Cup.

The rest of this assembly—while displaying Doyle’s unfaded ability to write snappy, natural dialogue—is pretty humdrum. The title piece, a brief sequel to The Commitments, follows foulmouthed former band manager Jimmy Rabbitte, now a loving husband and doting father, as he gets back into the music game to construct a multiculti super group. A blasé rehashing of the novel with some ethnic strife thrown in for good measure, the story asks if Rabbitte’s success has ruined his integrity. Ultimately, the spiritual perils of wealth and comfort make for a pretty tired story, revealing that Doyle’s fiction was better off when his Irish characters had no hope.

—Drew Toal

Doyle reads Jan 23 at the 92nd Street Y.