That Old Country Music: Stories

... a story brimming with both the desire for and the fear of strong feeling, handled with a loose, supple comedy ... Barry holds myth-making and dull reality in teasing balance, with a kind of comic double vision winking at the operatic and the bathetic by turns ... Fate, doom and disaster are lightly invoked, and swiftly brought down ... Barry’s rich comic and lexical gifts have shone particularly in his short fiction...The stories collected here are more relaxed, whimsical, even impressionistic ... Barry in mellower mood is more subtle and surprising ... However brokenhearted, Barry’s stories always sing.

There's not a bad story in the bunch, and it's as accomplished a book as Barry has ever written ... Barry does an excellent job probing the psyche of his diffident protagonist, and ends the story with an unexpected moment of sweetness that's anything but cloying — realism doesn't need to be miserablism, he seems to hint; sometimes things actually do work out ... Barry has a rare gift for crafting characters the reader cares about despite their flaws; in just 13 pages, he manages to make Hannah and Setanta come to life through sharp dialogue and keen observations ... Barry proves to be a master of writing about both love and cruelty ... Barry brilliantly evokes both the good and bad sides of love, and does so with stunningly gorgeous writing ... There's not an aspect of writing that Barry doesn't excel at. His dialogue rings true, and he's amazingly gifted at scene-setting — he evokes both the landscape of western Ireland and the landscape of the human heart beautifully. His greatest accomplishment, perhaps, is his understanding of the ways our collective psyche works; he seems to have an innate sense of why people behave the way we do, and exactly what we're capable of, both good and bad.

Barry is particularly impressive as a writer of men’s voices and stories, which means that he has the rare art of being able to convey in sentences what is not said, not even fully thought, by his characters ... We know what Séamus is thinking, and we can guess about Katherine. It’s not, exactly, that we need the happily-ever-after which appears to be receding, only that Barry’s writing of silence, of the ways we read silence, is uncomfortably excellent ... The 'heroic path' is taken by the stories, by the whole collection, as well as by the characters within. Though they all begin more or less in literary realism, there is another tendency pulling towards capital-R Romanticism, towards the suggestion that we are all in the end creatures of landscape, buildings and weather, what we imagine to be our actions directed by dimly seen powers beyond our control ... But these playful, serious and beautifully crafted stories allow Barry to experiment as we need great writers to do.