THE HEART IN WINTER, by Kevin Barry
The Irish writer Kevin Barry’s last novel, “Night Boat to Tangier” (2019), was a charmer. It was a word-drunk duet between a couple of aging tramps who dusted off their charisma and performed a bit of the old verbal soft-shoe as they waited in an all-night ferry terminal in Spain for their luck to change.
The heartsick dialogue slipped into comic reverie. “My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Málaga,” was a typical comment. So was, “I haven’t enjoyed a mirror since 1994.” I liked “Night Boat to Tangier” as much as anything I read in that prepandemic year. It made growing old seem (almost) like good, fractious fun.
Barry has a new novel out. It’s called “The Heart in Winter.” This title — earnest, generic, a bit flatulent — is worrisome. Let’s remain calm and proceed to the first page. Let’s remind ourselves that Barry is too shambolic and profane a writer to go squishy on us.
The first sentence is a stemwinder. I won’t print it in full here. I’ll simply note, to provide a general sense of the ambience, that it contains the phrases “crazy old meathead,” “filthy buckskin,” “wild tufts of hair,” “nightmare overgrown child,” “motley of rags,” “lurched and tottered on broken boots,” “massive obliterated eejit child” and “eyes burning now like hot stars.” It ends with a peddler’s ditty:
Pot-ay-toes?
Hot po-tay-toes?
Hot po-ah-toes a pe’nny?
We are in Barryland all right. His literary influences — James Joyce, Cormac McCarthy and J.P. Donleavy among them — are proudly displayed. Other influences that stream under this novel, I would guess, include John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” The Pogues’ album “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash,” the HBO series “Deadwood” and Dock Boggs’s murder ballad “Pretty Polly.”
“The Heart in Winter” is a western, even though most of its characters are Irish. It’s set in the early 1890s, mostly in Butte, Mont., which one character refers to as a “town of whores and chest infections.”
The plot is minimal. A woman, Polly Gillespie, rides into town to meet a man she has arranged to marry. He’s a faith-addled milquetoast. She does marry him, but falls in love with Tom Rourke, a dope fiend and a poetical soul with a “face on him like a tortured saint.” Tom visits her when the husband is away. He carves her first initial jaggedly into his chest. Their sex is immolating.
Like Johnny 99, Tom has debts no honest man can pay. Polly is fleeing troubles of her own back east. They want out of Montana. He robs his wealthy landlady, sets her boardinghouse on fire as a diversion and steals a beautiful horse. The two of them go on the lam. They dream of making it to San Francisco and inhaling salt air.
Bounty hunters are on their trail. These fellows are horribles and deplorables, delivered as if out of Gaelic myth. A description of one of these Beelzebubbas begins, “His noggin end was a tower of screeching bats.” Polly describes the novel’s entire vibe succinctly: “What we got us here, she thought, is one of those rank evil type nightmare situations.”
Let’s get the bad news out of the way. “The Heart in Winter” is not top-shelf Kevin Barry. He never quite gets a handle on these characters. The grace and casual wit that flowed through “Night Boat to Tangier” is largely absent. The awful things that occur don’t land, because we’re not invested in these addled souls.
“The Heart in Winter” makes the sound of a good writer spinning his wheels. There is little variation in the emotional register. Barry tries so hard to keep this material hopping that nearly every character twitches and shivers as if they were fighting off St. Vitus Dance, a variety pack of venereal diseases and delirium tremens.
Barry leans too far into the bawling and brawling nature of Irish melancholy. Self-glory, in the form of self-pity, floods treacle into the surroundings. There are many, many observations on the order of “you was born to a dark star,” “the prospect of death was a glamorous comfort,” “happiness ain’t generally how it works out for folks,” “soaked in the ambience of death from the cradle” and “terrible people, born of a terrible nation.”
In his author photo, Barry’s hair is blown back, as if from the wind of his own prose. He looks as if he picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue. His is an early contender for dust-jacket photo of the year.
Because Barry is Barry, moments of comic wonderment sneak in through the pantry door. I will name two. Tom works in Butte for a British photographer. Like nearly everyone in this novel, the photographer is more than a shade out of plumb. He’s a reeling misfit who “looked like he just crawl out of a bush ass-first and he kept sputtering some gibberish.”
The photographer has introduced a new style of portrait photography that’s made the city’s residents either anxious or titillated or both. His images depict woman as seen from behind. The women glance over their shoulders at the camera in a way that suggests, just out of the frame, “the swell of posterior and the one true street of the new world.”
The one true street of the new world? Talk about the road less traveled.
Another manic scene occurs when Polly, on her wedding night, goes to visceral extremes to prove she is a virgin, using sausage casings stuffed with clotted pig’s blood. When one breaks, it turns “the mattress into an abattoir.”
This novel’s epigraph is from the Canadian American writer Mary MacLane. It reads, “I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.” That is true, up to a point. But there’s rarely beauty in overkill either.
Perhaps fearing he would give his readers too little, Barry has given them too much. It’s a great quality in a host, except when it isn’t.
THE HEART IN WINTER | By Kevin Barry | Doubleday | 243 pp. | $28
#Lam #Wild #West #Bounty #Hunters #Trailing
