Homesickness

In The Ways, the second story in Colin Barrett’s superb second collection, every sentence is as full and alive as a sentence can be, while managing to stay ordinary ... This collection extends Barrett’s range, but it has its share of damage, still. Two men are in wheelchairs; one character’s hands are stuck in a rictus that obliges him to drink from a straw. A stranger is 'touched,' as people were said to be touched by the fairy folk ... In some stories, the folkloric gives way to the contemporary right there on the page ... In its highest style, the work fits into a tradition that moves through Kevin Barry and Marina Carr back to the epic tales of old Ireland, a mode that shifted from the heroic into the mock-heroic in the work of Joyce and Flann O’Brien ... I don’t think it is too strong to say that Barrett’s work hit an inflection point in Irish culture ... To be a male writer in those years must have required a kind of double vision, a tally of what might be lost and what could be gained. This is more problematic in a tradition so interested in loss, and how men in particular deal with the hurt of dispossession ... A real writer (no small compliment, here) meets all this. He lets the changing moment sink in and settle, and inform what comes next ... Barrett is already one of the leading writers of the Irish short story, which is to braggingly say, one of the leading writers of the short story anywhere. He means every word and regrets every word. He just kills it.

Its comedy stands in balance to the collection’s more tragic tenor ... expands [Barrett's] 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 ... 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.

Barrett’s stories contain so many layers they’re worth rereading more or less right away ... Some prose writers, especially those who are deft with plot, can keep your attention even while writing unnecessary sentences. That’s not the case with Barrett. Every line counts; if you skim his work, you may understand it, but you’ll rob yourself of both pleasure and surprise ... That needle-drop of wisdom amid life’s dailiness signals Barrett’s unique genius more than any under-35 accolade can ... If Barrett should choose one day to write a novel, it will be something to see, perhaps like the parts of the Irish coastline the tourists ignore. Forget your Cliffs of Moher and take a detour to those at Slieve League; gasp as you summit the rise and face natural glory unmarred by visitor centers or traveling herds in thin plastic ponchos ... That’s the experience of reading Barrett’s fiction — the hard truth shorn of familiar signposts or souvenirs. He writes what he knows, but he also writes to discover what he doesn’t know, a simple but crucial distinction you can sense instinctively, no matter how many of his compatriots you’ve already read.