Molly Bloom Said ‘Yes,’ Paula O’Leary Says ‘Maybe’ : FICTION : THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS,<i> By Roddy Doyle (Viking: $22.95; 208 pp.)</i>

Reading “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors,” one almost can’t help making chilling comparisons between its tough, buoyant narrator and James Joyce’s Molly Bloom. In his new novel, Roddy Doyle (author of “The Commitments” and “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,” winner of Britain’s Booker Prize) has given us another powerfully memorable Irish woman soliloquizer.

Like the soaring voice that keeps echoing long after the last lines of “Ulysses,” Doyle’s Paula Spencer is at once ordinary and mythical, lyrical and gritty, down to earth and so much larger than life that her personality keeps spilling over the boundary between the spiritual and the carnal. But the differences between these two female characters are profoundly disturbing, and readers may find themselves contemplating the drastic changes that have taken place in women’s lives, or perhaps just in the quantities of hard truth that writers feel allowed--or compelled--to tell about the harrowing struggles for survival that so often pass for domestic routine. Unlike Molly, who ends her reverie with that oceanic yes, Paula recounts a disturbing, painful and frequently hilarious personal history that is, at its most joyous, more appropriately an occasion for a highly qualified maybe.

While Molly moves toward an affirmative celebration of the life-force and of sex, Paula has learned that romance can be the start of catastrophic problems. At moments, she steps back from her narrative to speak of herself in the third person, with a devastatingly unflinching view of her present situation: “She’ll be 39 in two months’ time. . . . See her when she’s getting out of bed and she’ll look 50. She’s an office cleaner; she gets two-fifty an hour. She does houses as well in the morning. . . . She has four children. She is a widow. She is an alcoholic. She has holes in her heart that never stop killing her. . . . She isn’t too fond of herself but she isn’t so certain that she’s stupid anymore. She manages; she’s a survivor. She has loose skin on her arms but her neck is still all right.”

And yet Paula’s boiled-down summary of her life leaves out much that is important--the energy, complexity, depth and detail that make “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors” so convincing and impressive. As Doyle’s brief narrative progresses by association from the past to the present, from the concrete to the abstract, from the gently comic to the tragic and terrifying, we feel Paula working--overtime, as it were--to bring order to her chaotic recent experience and to find some meaning and even hope in her own thoroughly unextraordinary but wholly singular story.

The book’s first sections move so swiftly--and deliver so much information with such economy and compression--that we may quickly (and wrongly) come to believe we know all there is to know about how the girl, Paula O’Leary, developed into the married woman and mother, Paula Spencer. Despite what Paula’s sister says (one sub-theme of the novel is the difficulty of ever determining exactly how and why things occurred), Paula had a happy childhood: “When I think of happy and home together I see the curtain blowing and the sun on the wall and being snug and ready for the day, before I start thinking about it like an adult. I see flowers on the curtains--but there were never flowers on the curtains in our room. I asked my mammy when I was over there last week did we ever have flowery curtains and she said, No, they’d never changed them, always stripes.”

But the humiliations of a school staffed entirely with vicious and incompetent teachers undermine the solid identity that Paula has brought from home, and all she learns from her classes is that the surest way to be someone is to wield her sexual power over the equally hapless boys. But even that fragile margin of influence is sacrificed the instant she meets Charlo Spencer, the dangerously charming young man she eventually marries: “I’d loved him before I even met him and I never stopped. The minute I saw him, before I saw his face properly. I knew what being in love was. It was dreadful.”

And dreadful it certainly is: After a blissful honeymoon and before the birth of their first child, Charlo begins drinking heavily, reverting to the thieving ways that run in his family and beating Paula severely. Not until she sees Charlo’s aggression beginning to focus on their daughter does Paula find (with the aid of a heavy frying pan) the strength to throw Charlo out. Soon after, he is killed while involved in a particularly ugly kidnapping and murder; the novel opens with the scene in which a young policeman arrives to tell Paula that Charlo is dead.

Only in its penultimate sections, when Paula describes her own feelings of guilt and responsibility for the beatings she’s received, is the novel marred by the faintest tinge of the sociological and the generic. (True or not, it’s what we always hear about battered women, and for a moment we feel quite cut off from Paula’s bracingly unsentimental, no nonsense individuality.) But throughout the rest of the book, we never doubt for a moment that we are hearing the utterly plausible, articulate voice of a woman--a character with first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to inhabit a female body. (One of the novel’s most moving passages describes the moment when Paula’s mother suddenly notices that her young daughter has grown breasts.)

For all its harrowing intensity, “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors” is a pleasure to read. It’s beautifully written, sympathetic and gifted with that narrative authority we expect from first-rate writers. And in the era in which one still hears discussions about the absurd question of whether it’s permissible or even possible to write from the point of view of the other gender, Doyle’s novel will--one hopes--help resolve that debate. It reminds us of how some of fiction’s most unforgettable women were created by men: Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and now that foul-mouthed, lively, immensely endearing survivor: Paula Spencer, Molly Bloom’s sadder and wiser younger sister.