KEVIN BARRY’S LATEST COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES IS STELLAR
Like Ireland, the island on which Kevin Barry’s fiction is set, the characters that populate his works are remote yet tantalizingly close to others who may offer promise or enrichment. It’s not just life’s so-called commoners who are in a reflective mood. Even luminaries such as John Lennon, the protagonist of the novel “Beatlebone,” seek solace and contemplation in Ireland — in his case, confronting his view of fame as “a scouring and a hollow thing.”
The Lennon of that novel isn’t the only one contending with feelings of hollowness. In that regard, he’s like the working-class antiheroes who populate Mr. Barry’s work, people such as the “two fading Irish gangsters” in the brilliant “Night Boat to Tangier,” and the men and women who anchor the stories in “That Old Country Music.”
Mr. Barry’s characters’ conduct often belies their true nature, as is the case with Seamus Ferris, the narrator of “The Coast of Leitrim.” Ferris worked in a factory, spending eight years toiling at a dead-end job before redundancy set him free. But, in a typically lyrical phrase, he “had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feeling,” preferring wine and French films. One of the attractions of Katherine, the Polish woman who works at the café he frequents, is her apparent fondness for the French New Wave director Éric Rohmer.
Their eventual romance takes unpredictable turns, as is true with the many yearnings, fulfilled or otherwise, that these 11 stories dramatize. The quest for love is often the source of the drama, as with “Deer Season,” in which a 17-yearold woman is eager for sex before her return to school.
The scandal that results from her relations with a 32year-old she calls the riverman has a predictable ending, yet its strongest moments evoke the sadness of isolation.
Other stories aren’t fully fleshed out and don’t go beyond obvious emotions. “Toronto and the State of Grace” is little more than an adult son and his elderly mother sitting at a bar and discussing hard times. And “Who’s-Dead McCarthy” is a trifle about a “hauntedlooking” man who sidles up to townsfolk to gossip about the latest death, with “a special relish” for “slapstick death,” such as falling off a stepladder. His fate will not come as a surprise.
But most of the pieces in “That Old Country Music” are stellar, including the title story, in which a pregnant teen’s much-older male lover, who used to be her mother’s lover, aims to rob a gas station; “Roma Kid,” a surprisingly tender story of a 9-year-old runaway and the “ferny, mossy, twisted” old man who takes her in; and even a fictionalized conversation between a doctor and poet Theodore Roethke when the latter had a breakdown during a 1960 visit to an island off the coast of County Galway.
The hallmarks of Mr. Barry’s writing are in evidence here, from the earthy dialogue to his many poetic descriptions. At a tragic moment in an especially bleak story, a cop “feared now the summer night for its sly and sweet-found darkness.” In another, “Catastrophe was a low-slung animal creeping darkly over the ditches, across the hills.”
That low-slung animal is on the prowl throughout these tales. Yet Mr. Barry is always compassionate toward his characters, from cancer patients who refuse treatment because the medicine makes them impotent to abusive mothers who summon inordinate empathy at the most felicitous times. In the world of Kevin Barry, a working-class antihero sure is something to be.