Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments was one of the great music novels of the past few decades. Published in 1989 and serving as the start for Doyle’s unofficial “Barrytown Trilogy” (also comprising The Van and The Snapper), it followed knockabout Dubliner Jimmy Rabbitte’s attempt to put together a great soul/R&B band with nothing but Irishmen. Doyle’s newest novel, The Guts, picks up with Jimmy many years on, still working with music but saddled with middle-aged responsibilities and a new problem: Cancer.

My review of The Guts is at PopMatters:

Jimmy’s reflexive fear of sentiment is a powerful force in the book, and it works both for and against what Doyle is trying to achieve. In refusing to turn Jimmy into some sad, caterwauling victim baying at the moon, Doyle keeps the book from being just another sickness story. It’s Jimmy’s story through and through. Within a few dozen pages, he has pushed on past the cancer and is concerned more with the other matters that will not wait; family, the bills, what to do about that old female friend he just ran into who seems keen. Most problematic is work at the small excavatory Irish music site he started (“Finding old bands and finding the people who loved them”) whose fortunes were as bitterly unforgiving as any 21st century creative enterprise…