In summary an enjoyable read that really put you in the atmosphere of the rougher edges of Dublin early-90s life.

Jimmy Rabbitte, just a tick out of school, gets a brilliant idea: to put a soul band together in Barrytown, his slum home in north Dublin. Set during the heady days of Ireland's brief, euphoric triumphs in the 1990 World Cup, this Booker Prize nominee is a tender and hilarious tale of male friendship, midlife crisis, and family life. They also were just challenging enough to make the reader have to think about how the characters ended up where they were. And his friend Bimbo after they are made redundant and they set up a chip van during the madness that was Italia 90 (the high point in Irish football).The Barrytown Trilogy is a gas and has some of the funniest, most natural dialogue I've read: sometimes you'd swear you're sitting in the kitchen with them, listening in . At this point the family was fun and really thrived as a whole, with parents who really identified with their kids. The first part "The Commitments", in my opninion, is the poorer history, The Snapper and The Van are "deeper" , The Van wins.

The Snapper ends with the birth of Sharon's daughter Gina, and The Van picks up with the Rabbitte family just a couple of years later. In The Guts, Jimmy has since married Aoife and they have four children, and he is suffering from bowel cancer.Once I started looking at his novels though, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was the mastermind behind The Commitments, a movie I love. In "The Snapper", Sharon Rabbite's pregnancy sparks off intense speculation among her friends and family, but she is determined to reveal the identity of the father in her own time. A third novel, The Van, was published and shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, followed by a film adaptation in 1996. The dichotomy of his character is tantamount to the success of everyone else in the story because you feel like their moods live off of his. In The Snapper, Jimmy frequently practices being a DJ, much to the predictable annoyance of his father.

When he is nice and thoughtful, you as the reader feel like you've been treated to the Choc-Ice yourself (Or one of those Tina Turner drinks, wha' are they? I actually rediscovered the Rabbitte family when I stumbled across Doyle's recently written and published sequel "The Guts" (a must read, too! Also, for the occasionally rough language, Doyle really spreads the love around, without it getting schmaltzy -- the locale, the characters -- it makes for warm reading.I was familiar with the films of The Commitments and The Snapper but had never read the books, and I knew nothing about The Van. I always like to read an author's earliest books -- you usually see a lot of growth over a short space. He has the archetypal Dublin bowises as friends, the lad who can get you anything from the back of a truck, the grumpy auldfella and the best mate who he shares more with than his wife. I haven't seen the movie but don't know how it could be any better -- funnier, quicker, sweeter, or even more musical -- than this.

I laughed out loud through all three books, welled up a number of times, and recognized my own Irish family -- sometimes painfully -- on every page.The surname of the Rabbitte family was changed to the maiden name of Curley for the film adaptations of The Snapper and The Van, as 20th Century Fox owns the rights to the Rabbitte name from The Commitments, who were not involved in the adaptations of subsequent works in the trilogy. The Snapper revolves around unmarried twenty-year-old Sharon Rabbitte's pregnancy, and the unexpected effects this has on her conservative, working class Dublin family. Jimmy Sr and Veronica, amongst their many children, also have a set of smart-assed, ballroom dancing twins.