Set mostly in western Ireland, Colin Barrett’s second collection is a painterly portrait of characters on the edge.
HOMESICKNESS: Stories, by Colin Barrett
Maybe you’ve had a similar encounter, up late quietly reading, when before you know it you were swept up into a story whose energy kept building by way of comic invention, your laughter disrupting the night. It’s an experience worth pursuing, especially in trying times.
Trying times are the context for “The Alps,” the story in question, from Colin Barrett’s second book, “Homesickness.” Its comedy stands in balance to the collection’s more tragic tenor. The setting isn’t Switzerland, but County Mayo, Ireland, at the Swinford Gaels football club. The Alps is the local moniker for three brothers: “shortish men with massive arses and brutally capable forearms. They breathed coltishly through their noses and rolled their shoulders with a circumspect flourish whenever women crossed their paths. They billed themselves as tradesmen, though between them had never acquired a qualification in any particular trade.” Their massiveness will figure in the story’s wonderfully unpredictable ending.
The eight stories in “Homesickness” are Barrett’s follow-up to “Young Skins” (2014), a debut that garnered major prizes including the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award. “Homesickness” expands his range, and though the first took place in the fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh, the books share a fabric shot through with dark humor, pitch-perfect dialogue and a signature freshness that makes life palpable on the page. The language counterpoints the sometimes inarticulate desperation of the working-class characters, and that dissonance lends an emotional complexity to their stories. The painterly descriptions conflate character and place, as in “Anhedonia, Here I Come,” which follows Bobby Tallis, a poète maudit on a six-mile walk on the weird side that will lead to a striking conclusion. “Bobby was certain he was the only resident under the age of 60” in his building, whose “corridors — the sour-cream walls lit by low-wattage sconces downy with dust; the furred, blue, perpetually damp carpeting in which shoe-print impressions dolefully lingered — evoked for Bobby a budget version of the afterlife.”
Irish writers have excelled at proving the paradox that the local yields the universal. The title of Barrett’s book alludes to that lineage, and specifically to “Home Sickness,” the classic story by George Moore from the early 20th century, in which an Irish American immigrant returns to Ireland to regain his health, but finds he’s lost his connection to village life, and goes back to New York.
In Barrett’s stories, homesickness mostly afflicts those who’ve stayed home, but no longer fit. Their lives orbit physical and mental illness, alienation, substance abuse, wounds, suicide and bad luck that exceeds society’s margin for error. In “The Ways,” three orphaned siblings struggle to stay a family after cancer has taken “the folks.” Home has become an edge, and life on the edge is the theme and variation, the underlying design that gives this book its power. Each story exerts the tension of social connections being tested. Sometimes, depending on who is measuring, the connections appear to hold as they do in the memorable opening story, “A Shooting in Rathreedane.” In other stories, despite good intentions and the intimate bonds of the past, the resilient cannot sustain the vulnerable.
As a writer, Barrett doesn’t legislate from the top down. His unruly characters surge up with their vitality and their mystery intact. Their stories aren’t shaped by familiar resolutions — no realizations, morals or epiphanies. The absence of a conventional resolution does risk leaving an otherwise charming story like “The Silver Coast” with the rambling feel of a slice of life. But in the majority of the stories in this book, to reinvent an ending is to reinvent how a story is told, and overall, “Homesickness” is graced with an original, lingering beauty.
HOMESICKNESS: Stories, by Colin Barrett | 213 pp. | Grove Press | $27
Stuart Dybek is the author, most recently, of “Paper Lantern: Love Stories.”
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April 30, 2022 at 04:00PM
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Review: ‘Homesickness,’ by Colin Barrett - The New York Times
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