Free The Modern Library by Colm Tóibín, Carmen Callil Page A

States. The story of Coalhouse Walker, the black man whose car is vandalized, is the most powerful and dramatic in the book. (It occurred to Father one day that Coalhouse Walker Jr. didn’t know he was a Negro.’) The novel’s other protagonist, of course, is the privileged narrator himself, whose father has gone on an Arctic expedition, whose uncle’s – Mother’s Younger Brother – obsessions move right through the novel, whose tone, in its easygoing neutrality and awestruck curiosity, is close to that of the narrator of The Great Gatsby.
    E. L. Doctorow was born in New York. His other novels include The Book of Daniel (1971), Billy Bathgate (1988), and The March (2005) which won the Pen Faulkner Award and the American National Book Critics Circle Award.
    Age in year of publication: forty-four.
     
     

Roddy Doyle 1958–
     
1990 The Snapper
     
    The Rabbittes, who appear in The Commitments (1987), The Snapper and The Van (1991), are the first happy family to appear in Irish writing since The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Of these three novels The Snapper is probably the most accomplished. The Snapper tells the story of Sharon Rabbitte, twenty-year-old daughter of Jimmy and Veronica, who gets pregnant. The father is an unlikely suspect, and Sharon doesn’t want anyone to know who it is; the novel follows the course of her pregnancy and the antics of her family and friends.
    Doyle captures brilliantly the atmosphere of a working-class Dublin family and community; there is a superb account in the novel of a large family in a small space, all of them shouting different things at the same time on the same page. There is something almost miraculous in this book about the way in which dialogue is manipulated and controlled. The laughter and wisecracks , the drama between individuals and the group, the skilful pacing, make the book incredibly readable. It is also politically sharp in its depiction of an Ireland in which religion and nationalism have lost their power.
    Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin and lives there still. He has written five novels and two plays. The Snapper was made into a film by Stephen Frears; The Commitments was filmed by Alan Parker. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize in 1993. He has also written two volumes of The Last Round Up: A Star Called Henry (1999), and Oh, Play That Thing! (2004).
    Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
     
     

Margaret Drabble 1939–
     
1977 The Ice Age
     
    ‘A huge icy fist, with large cold fingers, was squeezing and chilling the people of Britain.’ This is the 1970s, the decade which followed the flourish of the Swinging Sixties and the Beatles, in which boom and bust and national depression and greed set the scene for the arrival of Thatcher, a punishment for all the sins so splendidly chronicled here.
    Margaret Drabble writes in a tradition currently out of fashion – that of Mrs Gaskell and Arnold Bennett, in which social conscience and a social historian’s eye control her imagination, making her a fine recorder of the way we live together, and of the moral consequences of same.
    Anthony Keating, Drabble’s hero, is a perfect Seventies man. He writes songs, he works in television, then throws everything up for property speculation, the quick-buck Seventies virus which infected England, and which in this case gives Keating a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. Drabble places Keating in a crowded, vivid world. With wife and children, mistress and her children, business colleagues inside and outside prison, danger abroad, danger at home, to a threnody of dead or decrepit dogs, Keating’s story is a burst of indignation for a senile Britain. Because Drabble is so skilled a storyteller, The Ice Age is full of surprises, full of interest, an immensely absorbing record of a shabby age.
    Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield and lives in London and Dorset. Her body of work includes the trilogy The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The