Freud once observed that “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” How many men’s acts of self-immolation are the result of too much of one and not enough of the other, or vice-versa? Part of human frailty is the inability to see clearly the balance of our scales, and to over- or under-correct, or to blame one when the other is at fault.

Jimmy Rabbitte is not immune to this. When he meets an old friend unexpectedly—Imelda Quirke, the attractive backup vocalist first introduced in The Commitments—and she shows interest in him, he feels a spark of life and a renewed sense of manliness, however misguided and despite a happy home life and a wife he adores. Consider his reaction to a surreptitious text message from Imelda:

And one from Imelda. Whenll I see u agen? 2 many precious moments. Oh Christ. What had he fuckin’ done? But he knew what had happened. She’d written the first bit, recognized the lyric – the Three Degrees, 1974 – and she’d written the rest of it. For the laugh. It wouldn’t be a bad song for the funeral, now that he thought of it.

The joy and the fear and the exhilaration of it all seem to satisfy some part of him hollowed by middle age. He later thinks of the “two women” who love him, and immediately corrects himself. But such contradictions, and the tiny wars waged within our minds, are Doyle specialties, and those contradictions apply not only to love, but also to family. With pleasure comes panic as our children come of age—panic not at what our progeny will do, but what their looming adulthood will do to us.

He sat up a bit. Don’t fuckin’ groan. He leaned out and patted Marv’s shoulder. Marv didn’t move, didn’t swerve out of reach. That was good. The shoulder felt big, hard; it belonged to a man. That was the problem. That was the thrill.

In Paula Spencer, the title character suffers similar interior blows over her failure as a mother, the ever-present threat of a relapse into full-blown alcoholism, and the prospect of an empty nest.

There’s no energy in her. Nothing in her legs. Just pain. Ache. The thing the drink gets down to. But the drink is only part of it. She’s coped well with the drink. She wants a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She fights it. She wins. She’s proud of that. She’s pleased. She’ll keep going. She knows she will. But sometimes she wakes up, knowing the one thing. She’s alone.

Though its plot chiefly concerns a frightening cancer diagnosis and treatment, The Guts is never quite as melancholy as The Van, which is, essentially, about unemployment and a food truck. (For what it’s worth, The Guts is practically a Douglas-Adams-style romp compared to Paula Spencer.) This irony exists in part because, although both are good men, Jimmy Rabbitte is simply smarter than his father, and more artful when dealing with the pressures of life, whether it’s paying the bills in a lagging economy or weighing the cost of marital infidelity. Readers of The Van are compelled to will Jimmy Sr. along as he muddles through his midlife crisis, understanding full well that he could, at any moment, doom himself with a wrong decision. The Guts, meanwhile, offers the reader a degree of permission to relax and see how the younger Jimmy pulls it off.