After music-hall superstar Marie Lloyd died in 1922, T.S. Eliot published a brief tribute to her and her art form. The music-hall revue, Eliot believed, depended upon the common knowledge between the audience and the performer.

To appreciate, for instance, her last turn as a charwoman, one had to know what objects a middleaged woman of the lower classes “would carry in her bag; exactly how she would go through her bag in search of something; and exactly the tone of voice in which she would enumerate the objects she found in it.”

Audience and artist shared not only class but an authentic grasp of local detail. Eliot thought motion pictures, then a nascent art form, would fail to entertain as effectively because they were designed for generic international audiences.

The Irish novelist Roddy Doyle has just published a novel about a charwoman, “Paula Spencer” (Viking, 281 pages, $24.95), that would have pleased Marie Lloyd, if not Eliot. Paula, age 49, has been without a drink for four months and five days. Mr. Doyle’s fans will remember her alcoholism from “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors” (1996).

Paula entertains with her depressed optimism, expressed in thoughts strung together just as if they might be overheard:

Not tonight. Not today. But she knows the bad days. She recognises them. She feels them coming. They’re real but they don’t often fool her. She feels them going too.

No special knowledge is required to understand Paula’s self-cajolement.

But elsewhere Mr. Doyle rounds out Paula’s character with authentic details: When Paula cleans a house, she doesn’t start at the top. Instead she likes to begin in the kitchen, “especially in the winter.” When cleaning offices, she can tell easily tell the women’s desk from the men’s: Women have OK magazine in their bins. The modern charwoman finds and appreciates the detritus of local detail. Even her disorientation is peculiarly Irish, she believes. Only Bulgarians and teenagers, Paula assumes, know east from south, as if Ireland were the center of the world.

Perhaps because Paula is a character from a book set in the 1990s, Mr. Doyle spends a lot of time bringing her up to date. She gets a cell phone for her birthday. She dutifully thinks about guestworkers from Nigeria.

The real draw of Mr. Doyle’s novel is his fluent Irish diction and the frankly cozy atmosphere it produces, even in a novel about alcoholism. We Americans like to pretend that we get all the jokes — and maybe we do, after long practice.

Here in New York, an overdeveloped sense of locality often ends in overblown rhapsody — that is, badly. Adam Rapp lays it on thick in “The Year of Endless Sorrows,” which begins with a remembrance of the details stored in the minds of eager new arrivals from farming country:

The sofas back in our Midwestern homes smell like beef Wellington and forest rain and something not unlike the woodchip mulch used to be gerbil terrariums.

We smell things on the street that remind us of the old pullout back in Manteno … A vinyl record on the Second Avenue sidewalk between Fifth and Sixth can do it to us. The inside of a bowler hat — something from an altogether different time — even that can do it to us.

This first-person-plural promises an ensemble epic, a “Friends” with deep roots and a Proustian nose. But Mr. Rapp’s opening gives way to an “I” with a job in publishing, who seems aware that his life resembles a coming-of-age novel:

The details of my novel, the saga of my sofa-bound roommate, my state of economic squalor, my now ruined Underwood, the struggling puccoon on my windowsill, my brush with the world of venereal disease, my peasant’s wardrobe, my embarrassingly boyish skin, my perpetually recovering left knee, my lack of a normal sex life, and a slowly encroaching, shoulder-pinching insomnia.

The narrator’s pride in his zany suffering, the eclecticism of it, is the motor of the novel, as his publishing bosses would say. At more than 400 pages, “The Year of Endless Sorrows” feels too long and too episodic, and Mr. Rapp’s sense of humor denies his character any serious stake in the city: His novel and his girlfriends become props for extended gags. Right from the beginning he cannily acknowledges his incomplete relation to his fellow denizens in the East Village, the “people with whom we liked to believe we shared a kinship.”

The sense of humor that keeps Mr. Rapp’s novel from ever truly touching ground also keeps the pages turning. It’s like a publishing job you can’t quite quit.

blytal@nysun.com