He didn't know who was who, or what was going on.' He also has to tell his father that he has cancer. But when the novel starts, in 2011, the economy has gone down the pan and Jimmy is in the pub with his dad, finding it 'foreign, in a way. He has a lovely wife, Aoife four bright, rowdy teenage children and a house in 'a middle-class area' not far from where he grew up. The boom years have been good to Jimmy Rabbitte: he has made a living out of resurrecting old Irish punk bands and flogging their songs on the internet. It's certainly nostalgic, but it's also a sustained attack on Irish nostalgia. Characteristically for Doyle, The Guts is a feelgood novel about bowel cancer and Ireland's financial meltdown.

He has always been particularly good at balancing sweet and sour, comedy and grime, lightly worn pathos and an unsentimental recognition of the hard facts (though as his career has progressed, the overall mood has become gradually more sombre).

They are thick with local detail: Barrytown is a fictional version of Kilbarrack, a down-at-heel suburb of north Dublin where Doyle grew up and worked as a school teacher for 14 years. His plots are minimal and unsensational, but they usually turn on an acknowledged 'social problem', such as teenage pregnancy ( The Snapper), unemployment ( The Van), family breakdown ( Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha) or domestic abuse ( The Woman Who Walked Into Doors). Almost all his stories deal with the downtrodden, the underdogs, the ignored. At heart, though, Doyle is a classic social realist, working in a tradition that stretches from Zola to Ken Loach. In recent years, Doyle has reinvented himself – with mixed results – as a magic realist: his Last Roundup trilogy was an irreverent fable that reworked Republican history, following Henry Smart's Zelig-like passage through Ireland's 20th century. How come Bertie has such a young son? Jimmy asked. 'I have yeah Ted, you big gobshite,' replies Dougal.) The Guts even starts in the pub that was the setting for much of the Barrytown Trilogy ( The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van), where Jimmy and his dad, Jimmy Sr, are shooting the breeze: ('Have you been reading those Roddy Doyle books again, Dougal?' asks Father Ted when his simple sidekick unexpectedly calls him a 'big bollix'. It provides everything that, back in the mid-1990s, a Roddy Doyle novel seemed to represent: a big, raucous but loving Northside Dublin family perfectly pitched dialogue well-observed male camaraderie a lot of music and, perhaps most of all, entertaining profanity. Billed as 'the return of Jimmy Rabbitte', it takes up again, 20 years on, with the teenage svengali who decided that Dublin needed a white soul band, and named them the Commitments.

'N ostalgia's always big in a recession,' says a character in Roddy Doyle's new novel – and, in The Guts, Doyle has served up a good-sized helping of it.

Roddy doyle's the commitments