Early in his 2015 novel Beatlebone, a metaphysical, midlife-crisis romp about Ireland, England, and John Lennon, author Kevin Barry writes that the filthy-rich ex-Beatle purchased a small island “when he was 27.” A decade later, Lennon has “come over a bit strange and dippy again—the hatches to the underworld are opening—and he needs to sit on (that) island.” From Barry’s debut 2007 story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, to his latest lean and powerful novel, The Heart in Winter, the Irish author might lull and disorient readers with lush prose or slapstick comedy. All the while, though, some door to some underworld is always rattling, about to fly off.

Barry’s first novel, City of Bohane (2011), is set in a kind of underworld: It’s High Noon meets Peaky Blinders, an alternative, futuristic Ireland where gangs battle for control. The book won the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award and reimagined swaths of Irish history and genre-writing for the twenty-first century. Barry then swerved to Beatlebone, an alternately raucous and intimate chronicle of a stressed-out celebrity and his sidekick, a witty Irish chauffeur/philosopher. Lennon is struggling to settle into life as a Manhattan Dad and exorcise lingering demons via “scream therapy.” There’s a generous portion of Becket in the absurd lengths to which the world-famous singer must go to complete what is—strictly in terms of kilometers—a short journey to his island. Again and again, Lennon’s journey is delayed—by snooping journalists, a wild party, and endless banter about the Muppets, Kate Bush, and a dog named after one of the Beach Boys. But distance, time, language, and other such matters are often stretched, fragmented, or downright warped in Barry’s work. To ensure the reader’s head never quite stops spinning, Barry also indulges a weakness for jarring adjectives. Lennon has “monkey feet” and experiences a “clamminess as of families.” There are also “arrogant spiders” and “handsomeness” that is “gooey.”

No wonder a character in Barry’s 2020 story collection That Old Country Music says of Ireland: “This place could wreak fucking havoc on a man’s prose if you let it.” At times, Barry lets it. 

Each of Barry’s novels is more compressed than the last, and this pattern continues with The Heart in Winter. The novel opens in the dusty American West at the end of the nineteenth century. A backslapper with a taste for “dope and drink” named Tom Rourke sets out on a saloon crawl to catch up with fellow immigrants around Butte, most of whom are overworked, alone, and miserable. Fans of HBO’s bygone neo-Western Deadwood will recognize the revisionist frontier—the pervasive stink and air of menace, the obscene slurs “in seven languages.” “It was the season of lost souls,” Barry writes, after another rousing Saturday gives way to another lamentable Sunday. “The dead were plentiful on the streets of the town. Who would be the next to join them?” 

Barry sets this atmospheric stage with an impressive blend of true grit and darkly comic ennui, the hardboiled and heartbreaking. “In the evening sun the East Ridge glowed sombre and gold and an ignorant wind brought news of the winter. [Rourke] was appalled at the charismatic light. He marched into the cold wind.… He rejected once more the possibility of God.” Later, though, at the “breath of dawnsmoke,” Rourke paused and “looked down on the world” and “told God he was very proud of Him.”

On less existential days, Tom earns a few bucks as a frontier Cyrano, writing love letters for Butte’s laborers to far-off women, and one such correspondence results in a wedding. It is when the newlywed couple sits for a portrait in the town’s photography studio that something more consequential unfolds in a “single heated flash.” Tom and the bride, Polly, fall in love and run away together. Barry sends another unlikely duo out on another perilous trip; the door to another dreamy underworld has swung open.

The Heart in Winter is at its best as it tracks its desperate, fleeing lovers like a pair of anti-heroes from a 1970s Robert Altman Western. “Tom Rourke? All he’s ever dreamed of is being the outlaw type,” Barry writes, simultaneously deconstructing and reconstructing various archetypes. There are moments in The Heart in Winter—as there are in all of Barry’s novels—when you worry that the set-up might be better than the execution. Maybe this adventure might have worked better as a long but rigorously edited short story.

Rooting around the pockets of a particularly gullible mark, Rourke spots a newspaper clipping: “The Twelve Rules for Writing Western Adventures.” The ensuing quip—“There’s fucken twelve of ’em?”—is a good one. But we don’t always need our attention drawn to how many conventions Barry may or may not be undermining. This might merely remind some readers that their linguistic patience is close to exhausted. (Rourke’s breakfast eggs are first salted “unambiguously,” and then go down “controversially.”) More often than not, though, Barry’s down-and-out prose hits a spot somewhere between Dashiel Hammet, William Kennedy, and James McBride.  

The plot twists involving newfangled photography are more than just historical details. One photographer’s finances are in “fantastic health,” and his studio’s double-fronted windows

displayed the likenesses of miners, barkeeps, labourers, of cooks and maids, Poles and Irish, Croats and Cornish, of newly-wed couples in formal clinches, soon enough of their ghostly off-spring, and laughing cats and queenly dogs, and lately, after this new and salacious fashion, the portraits of ladies but indeed posed back-to-front, gazing coyly over their shoulders, showing in evening gowns the bared knit blades, the length of neck.

No one can seem to resist this democratic, pornographic exercise in self-regard. Rourke himself can’t pass a mirror without stealing an admiring glance.

How does this fit in with the doomed love story at the center of Heart in Winter? For one thing, it might make readers think twice about technology and social media as the sole causes of American narcissism or isolation. These are, in fact, the very things Rourke exploits when he sends off his ghostwritten missives in the voice of lonely men to woo distant women.

Greed, vengeance, envy, and other very human, very fatal flaws propel Heart in Winter to its bloody conclusion. One particularly menacing antagonist engages in a bit of “praying” and “rope business,” while chanting “Mary, Mother of God,” and “Jesus Christ Almighty, forgive me.” If a movie is ever made of Heart in Winter, the notoriously intense actor Michael Shannon should get first crack at this role; his character in Boardwalk Empire also dabbled in religious self-flagellation. Is this excessive or offensive?

The Heart in Winter ultimately moves at too brisk a pace to ruminate on such questions. Far better to enjoy Kevin Barry’s funny, devastating ride. After all, whatever you think about God—or life, death, love, loneliness, smutty photos, or the violent American West—may not matter all that much. As Barry wrote in City of Bohane: “Life tumbled on, regardless.”

The Heart in Winter
A Novel
Kevin Barry
Doubleday
$28 | 256 pp.