Book of the Month: The Deportees, by Roddy Doyle

If you're a one-time English Lit major like me, you don't have to own a passport to feel like you've been to Dublin: You've walked the streets with William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge and especially James Joyce as guide. Of course, that early 20th-century setting is a different world from the Dublin of today, and one wonders what those Irish icons would make of the latte-chugging, cell phone-gabbing, multi-hued capital of the booming "Celtic Tiger."

This transformed 21st-century Dublin is the locus—and in many ways the focus—of Roddy Doyle's brilliant new collection of stories, The Deportees. Doyle's writing is so conjuring and compelling that I finished the entire book in one sitting, unable to put it down. Each of the eight tales unfolds from the same plot: A traditional born-in-Ireland protagonist encounters a denizen of the new Ireland, born in Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Russia, or the States, and complications careen ineluctably along. Doyle's staccato rat-a-tat-tat dialogues and descriptions impart the edgy energy of contemporary Dublin, and he portrays his characters—native and immigrant alike—with a taut empathy that evokes the drudgeries and terrors of their worlds. In its energetic eloquence, The Deportees is squarely in the tradition of Joyce and Yeats; in its subject, it breaks new ground with a multi-layered collage of a culture—and a city—in transition.

For a truly time-bridging odyssey, do as I've just done and pour yourself a pint of Guinness, light the peat-fire in your thermostat, read The Deportees, and then crack open your yellowing college copy of Joyce's Dubliners. What a magical musical history tour! The characters and themes of Dublin past leap to life in Joyce's pages—religion, class, politics—while their current iterations—race, job, cultural upbringing—erupt out of Doyle's tales. It's an illuminating immersion in the old, new, and enduring Dublin—and makes me want to get out that passport and stroll those storied streets.