I VOLUNTEERED TO REVIEW THIS novel by my former Village Voice co-worker Ed Park because I assumed the conflicts of interest would be so blatant they’d implode—a roman à clef, in which I myself might play a minor role, about the alt-weekly where I got fired the same day young Ed did. But it wasn’t that simple. If this is indeed a roman à clef, nobody gave me the key. Even when I was editing a section there, I never kept up with Voice gossip, and what little I know suggests that aside from a few management butts, who are rendered with admirable sympathy, these young characters are heavily fictionalized, imported from elsewhere or altogether invented.

Moreover, Personal Days never references the alt-weekly trade. Physically, the office is The Voice’s, which had a ghost-town feel years before the paper was finally eaten up by New Times Inc. (now Village Voice Media) in early 2006—that elevator, what a bummer. The fear and trembling that pervaded the place toward the end is also familiar. But hoping to universalize his theme, Park never specifies how the unnamed business he describes brings in revenue.

Personal Days is about a, or the, workplace—and also, I suppose, alienated white-collar labor. This is problematic. Maybe insurance firms are like real estate firms are like marketing firms, although I doubt it. Newspapers are different—in their rhythms and pretensions, magnets for the kind of prematurely weary hipster-idealists who populate Mr. Park’s novel. Even in New York, ordinary industries don’t commonly employ many such folks.

As compensation in kind for its relatively abstract characterization and theme, Personal Days is diligently schematic and long on wordplay. There’s a fine running joke about three-syllabled theme restaurants—Herringbone, Demagogue, Parapet, Gondola, Aquifer, Schüssmeister’s—and a lot of funny stuff about computers: an incriminating e-mail sent to your boss because you mistyped a letter and your address book took over; fonts with names like Lemuria and Braggadocio; a plot-turning voice-recognition program called Glottis. The deposed co-worker’s notebook full of brutal homilies from imaginary win-the-rat-race books is a satirical tour de force.

For 190 pages Mr. Park’s narrative is deliberately choppy; he goes so far as to present his second section in outline form. This choppiness evokes with some poetry the disconnected lives of the half-dozen singles who spend most of their waking hours together suspecting deep down they’ll never see each other if—no, when—their jobs end. But this former literary editor is nothing if not writerly, and the ending of his novel is another tour de force—a one-sentence, 50-page plot denouement cum love letter the worker who survives the purge touch-types on his "craptop" in that elevator, unlit and marooned.

I dreaded that sentence. But though it ain’t Molly Bloom, I read it in one short and one very long gulp. To me, its impassioned rhythms—so unlike most newspaper rhythms, though at The Voice sometimes we tried—bespeak Mr. Park’s deep-down belief that white-collar laborers needn’t lead alienated lives.

Robert Christgau is a senior critic at Blender and a critic for All Things Considered. His Consumer Guide to CDs is featured monthly at MSN.com. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

The Words of Every Song comprises 14 linked, coincidence-laden stories about people in and around New York’s pop-music world—almost half of them female, for once—by a 2005 Barnard graduate whose lizmooremusic.com invites the visitor to stream 12 of her literate folk-rock songs. Those seeking insight into the music business should proceed forthwith to Jen Trynin’s memoir, Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be (2006)—it’s strictly 90’s, but Ms. Trynin has been there and gets it. Liz Moore has been nearby and doesn’t.

The corporate environment Ms. Moore describes is untouched by the economic crises and paranoid malaise of the downloading age—is in fact so stable that according to the omniscient narrator, a shallow 26-year-old A&R man is destined to remain at the same implausible major label for a long, lucrative career. The label’s big star is an implausible contemporary hybrid of Tom Petty and Dave Matthews, or perhaps a male Sheryl Crow. These have to be guesses because, unforgivably, this music book is almost devoid of musical description. Note the title: Words are Ms. Moore’s métier.

Not that there are no musical insights—Ms. Moore clearly retains vivid memories of adolescence, and within their sensitive limits her accounts of the inner lives of fans are both touching and acute. But what really interests her is what interests most literate folk-rockers: romantic vicissitude. Nine of her vignettes are dominated by affairs of the heart, and in three or four others love is the capper or subtext. Moreover, Ms. Moore craves romance per se, not sex-drugs-etc., and she’s so old-fashioned she refuses to distinguish it from marriage, an institution that plays a key role in five stories if you count the one where the young opera singer agonizes over her affair with a married German pop producer far from his hearth and home.

Good for the opera singer, I say—those Europeans and their damn sophistication. Rock ’n’ roll myth and sometimes rock ’n’ roll reality assumes the primacy of instant gratification and fucking around on the road. But for most of its practitioners, especially in these days of lowered expectations, that stuff is harder than it’s supposed to be, and it gets old quick. So the good-hearted star brings his wife and babies on tour. The manipulative bisexual up-and-comer eats herself sick after her male New Age lover dumps her and is then solaced by the female label secretary she’d cast aside. One sideman mourns the high school sweetheart he’s helped drive to suicide, while another, haunted by taking the virginity of a young fan who happens to be the long-lost daughter of an engineer mourning his abandoned marriage, makes a futile play for his high school English teacher.

If all this sounds a trifle silly, it is. But it’s also likable, well-rendered, sweet. As someone who’s listened to many more singer-songwriters than any literate person should, I was gratified to encounter one who could translate her wholesome values to the page.

Robert Christgau writes for Rolling Stone, and his Consumer Guide column is published monthly at MSN Music. He’s the author of Grown Up All Wrong (Harvard).

Half dialogue and capitalized song lyrics, The Commitments is far bolder formally than the movie (forget the rock group) of the same name. Not even The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), which completed Mr. Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy, approached its spareness. Nor were they as funny, though they tried. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), an impressionistic account of a boy and his battling parents, didn’t try and won a Booker Prize for its pains. Too bad, I say, that Mr. Doyle’s most respected novel is also his most conventionally literary. Whether the compulsion is internal or external, this longtime schoolteacher does sometimes strive for respectability, as in the magical realism of his two recent historical novels about the imaginary revolutionary Henry Smart. The same is even truer for the sad story Paddy Clarke has to tell. Funny novels about functional families rarely win prizes.

Then again, problem novels don’t win prizes either, and although the first Paula Spencer, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), was lauded for tackling the vexed subject of spousal abuse, its formal graces went largely unremarked. It’s unusual for a man to write first-person narrative from a female perspective, and although Francine Prose has compared Paula to Molly Bloom, it’s also unusual for any author to risk a voice the lit cops will find inarticulate. Ms. Prose is overstating, but I’m on her side— Paula retains plenty of wit for someone who’s survived 17 years of repeated, repetitive battering, which the back-and-forth confusion of her narrative reflects and represents. In the pitiless Chapter 26, an eighth of the book at 28 pages, sentences and fragments recur like blows. “He dragged me around the house by my clothes and by my hair.” “My back.” “Ask me.”

But The Woman Who Walked into Doors isn’t all brutal blaming—Paula had reason to love her Charlo, and though her alcoholism is understandable, it’s her responsibility nevertheless. Paula Spencer resumes her story 10 years later, with Charlo long since shot dead by the police and Paula four months into her latest attempt to quit drinking. This time the voice is third person. But the language is even more spare and staccato, with everything the narrator reports seen through the title character’s eyes or passed through her mind, which is preoccupied with staying sober and connecting to the four children she’s neglected. The action is stubbornly quotidian, proceeding sporadically with no chapters and few section breaks, and the banal dialogue echoes Paula’s uneducated vocabulary; spoken or thought, casual superlatives—“great,” “lovely,” “grand”—take on the unwilled quality of bodily functions, as natural as breathing or belching. There aren’t many laughs, either—fewer than in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, actually. If The Commitments is realistic, then Paula Spencer is naturalistic, only without the fatalism. Its flat factuality feels scientific rather than poetic, and its plot refuses to crest or resolve. For the few dissenting reviewers I’ve encountered, those qualities spell bor-ing, a judgment that probably conceals a distaste for the character Mr. Doyle chooses to honor. Of course the book moves—his sense of rhythm and pace never abandon him. Finding the character compelling and her story impossible to put down, I experienced Paula Spencer as an audacious experiment in minimalism: Beckett as Vladimir, Robbe-Grillet in love with life.

In love with life? You bet. For though linguistic amenities may be few and Paula’s life a rag-and-bone shop of the heart, the outlook here is anything but grim. Paula Spencer is a recovery novel, and who wants to read one of those? But it’s a recovery novel set in a recovering economy, and that’s grand. There’s a political subtext here having to do with the boom the Irish call the Celtic Tiger, and it’s also audacious—Mr. Doyle actually seems to believe that improved access to material goods helps make people happy. Gentrification, that scourge of all that is charming and authentic? Paula loves it. Helped out by her elder daughter and no longer losing hours at her cleaning job or wasting an ungodly chunk of her euros on vodka, she gradually fills the new fridge she’s been given and explores local consumer options. One of the first epiphanies in a novel that has its realistic share comes when her daughter phones Paula just after she’s just ordered cake (“Is there alcohol in that one?”) and coffee (the cup “a beautiful blue. No saucer.”) at a new Italian café. Paula pretends she’s home and says bye. Then:

“She adds her milk and tests the coffee.

“It’s lovely.”

Some of Mr. Doyle’s reviewers worry that Paula could fall off the wagon anytime. But through her creator, she knows so much about one day at a time that I doubt it. Instead, I worry that her back could still go when a life off the books has left her without medical insurance. I worry that she’ll lose her struggle to keep her younger daughter off the booze. I worry that the Celtic Tiger will start ripping up the furniture. But I trust Roddy Doyle to figure out what Paula’s life might be like should any or all of these bad things occur. He’ll care because he’s a realist. Sentimental shite my arse.

Robert Christgau is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone; his Consumer Guide column appears bimonthly on MSN Music.