I don’t know if we all have that romance, if everyone can relate to what it’s like to yearn to become a category of person generally understood to be in foreclosure by circumstances writ large (such as, say, a Legend of the Western Frontier, or a Renown Author of Serious Fiction), and to find someone who shares your ambition whereon the two of you serve as kind of mirrors to one another, in the process of cutting the strings that keep you bound to the straight world, so-called, out of a desire to pass over whatever threshold it might be that could change you into the desired being you’re both so hungry to become, as possessed by that hunger, you devour all before you, not only the words of many idolized authors, yes, but also myriad experiences and vistas and such meals as you are able at this younger stage in your life to string together, and finally of course, and perhaps most crucially of all, one another. The simple fact of one another, the mirror show, the tidal desire under the sway of a drunken moon. Who knows what I’m going on about? I barely do myself, though I can recall in sharp detail the time in my life that most fit this bill, and the person I shared it with, and the many things that felt possible then, the multiplicity of a future warm and vibrant and even, yes, keen with laughter, while on the flip side of that coin and never exactly forgotten spun perennially the specter of ruin.
My sense, anyhow, is that Kevin Barry gets it, if his latest novel, The Heart in Winter, provides fair indication. A doomy sweet romance set in and around and parts westerly from Butte, “the black heart of Montana, as it was so-called at the time by writing men with a penchant for the high style” Heart begins with one Tom Rourke, a squirrely Irish immigrant with a refined sense of what constitutes quality writing, such that he is in the habit—when not in the photography studio where he (almost but not quite) earns his keep—of penning swoony letters on behalf of his co-habitants on the raucous late 19th century bar scene to attract would-be brides for them from back east. And he’s good at it, too. When a bride arrives, inevitably the new couple appears at the photography studio where Tom assists in minting the image of their union. Some of these last, others don’t, but no one is ever the wiser about Tom’s part in the wooing, as he spends rollicking obscene nights chasing chemical highs and doing his best, but often failing, to steer clear of the local establishment for ladies whose loving is for sale. As Barry writes in the voice of Tom Rourke’s landlady, once she’s compelled to recall details about him by a local sheriff: “The boy Rourke was in the employment of the night... He did not sleep so much as the churchyard bat… It was as though he was trying to make contact with such figures as might be found on the far side of the night. Maybe he wanted to be with them.”
Into this picture arrives one Polly Gillespie, a woman of intrigue, sly and cleverly deceiving, and in flight from a bout of trouble from whence she came. Tom, given to improvising song lyrics, tries on a new set, “And if I met Polly in the woods/ I would kiss her if I could/ For that’s a thing that would do her good/ And a cup of tay in the morn-in’.” Only thing standing in the way of that cup of morning tea is how she’s bound in marriage to one Captain Harrington, he of the masochistic rectitude and repressed violence, a man who works as an overseer in the copper mines on the outskirts of Butte. Tom, in due time, finds himself talking to a fancy horse, a palomino—“who the fuck’s are you anyhow?”—and soon enough, Tom and Polly atop that palomino are cutting out for a new life in San Francisco, after having robbed the aforementioned landlady on whose motherly indulgence Tom once lived, and also burned down her boarding house. In addition to the unlawful commandeering of the horse. And Captain Harrington isn’t too pleased with these developments, either.
Barry has given us a careening adventure tale (“by the nails of the claw this young pair was clinging on”) that doubles in stretches as a picaresque reminiscent of Charles Portis, or more recently, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (albeit true that DeWitt’s novel, like Barry’s recent Night Boat to Tangier, is concerned mainly with relationships between men whereas Heart is most definitely centered in the space between a boy-man and woman-girl’s longing, “Her dreams slipped into his, and infected them, and his to hers, and the infection was squared.”); there’s a touch, too, of Terence Malick’s film Badlands, at least one prominent Leonard Cohen-style lyrical accent, and a heavier dose yet of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. The title itself brings to mind a famous phrase of Seamus Heaney’s: “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.” A native of Ireland like the late poet Heaney, Barry writes prose that sings, alternately visceral and moony, of the body’s beefy solidity and of the tides’ swirling evanescence, as he renders an Irish immigrant frontier milieu both romantic-hearted and prone to vicious turns. The assurance of the writing, the very groundedness of his literary footing, akin in spirit to the signature cadences of Nathan Englander’s Jewish-American or Victor LaValle’s (circa Slapboxing with Jesus) African-American vernaculars is of the kind to inspire jealousy in the more thoroughly diasporified among us, those whose language has been whitewashed, so to speak, by assimilation across generations. (But we’ll always have the self-invented American-ese of the likes of Raymond Chandler, won’t we?) Much is made of the Elegant Variation, the artful aversion to cloddishly repeated words and phrasing, but perhaps the greater skill is in how an author leans on the repeated word, a repeating phrase, to deepening effect.
Will the lovers make it? Barry’s fugitive pair delight in what’s illicit about their union and in the zero-sum-ness of it all as they flee through the frigid woods and desolate valley: they feel bad, too, but through the wild, unrestrained thick of sex, especially in the throes of mind-bending substances they receive from friendly parties along the way, something else surfaces. As seen by Tom, Polly’s eyes have a “deathloving shine” while “the hooktip of her nose was cold and blue as a berry and he kissed it.” For her part, Polly is concerned by “the way his accent would change… It was like he was trying on new versions of himself all the time as if they was jackets.” And she understands, regarding that palomino, “without passing remark on it that he didn’t know jackshit about horses.” Barry’s prose, relatively spare as it is, casts the kind of wide net in whose thematic capture you might discern the preoccupations of a Werner Herzog: “The foxes and the coyotes in the meantime those howling bitches were in a contest to see who could make the night sound more full of crazy sex and the bone evils and they was both winning…” Which, for those who know Herzog, might suggest a less than sparkling outcome for Tom and for Polly.
“Americans!” Tom Rourke cries out in a moment of reflection on their adventures and who they’ve met en route, not stopping to marvel at how he’s well on his way to becoming one, these people ever-changing, ever-evolving until such time as, until such time as—what exactly? “If there was a next life,” Barry writes, “they wanted to be hand in hand in that one too, come what may.” The novel’s conclusion, like that oft-inked snake ouroboros, gives out again onto its beginning, with at least one of the pair facing up to “the drag of the past.” Such a relationship, once it sets in and however things turn out, is always in some sense there, inside you. The excellence of The Heart in Winter lies not simply in the pleasures of Barry’s prose but the sneaky perspective shifts that slip into the novel proper, a record of how the ballad of Tom and Polly passes into the stuff of local legend. If there happens to be the rare unanswered logistical question in this historical novel (at some point, the lovers order room service, but how they did so, in 1891, on the western frontier, without benefit of a working telephone, isn’t spelled out) that’s the kind of detail only the narrow of mind, or small of heart, would dwell on. As a man who calls himself the Reverend declaims, “Belief goes in at gut level. Understand? Not at brain, at gut.”
Or, in Polly’s version, speaking to Tom at a quieter register in a more intimate moment on their way to San Francisco Bay, “She blew into his ear slowly and controlled it and said hey now listen up coz this is the sea.”
The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry
Doubleday, pub date: 7/9/24
256 pages
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