Tuesday 4/16/24
Kevin Barry serves as the New Yorker's token white Irish guy (complete with little hat, assortment of indoors scarves, and drinker's face--things that matter a lot to this kind of person) who does token white Irish fiction for the magazine's fiction section from time to time. He writes the same thing in every instance, because like all of these people, he can invent nothing. There's no newness. He's there to be the token white Irish guy doing the token white Irish guy fiction every now and again and have books come out with Graywolf, where boring, pretentious books go to fulfill their boring, pretentious book indie lit destiny.
There is never any variation with Barry's stories and there never will be. His number simply comes up when it does--as in, time to do Barry's Irish shit--and The New Yorker automatically plugs in his automatic, standard, valueless fare with its hallmarks of Creative Writing 101--white Irish guy style--and description for description's sake with stories that go nowhere. His function is to be The New Yorker's quota Irish white guy fiction writer. Sometimes they put in a has-been-who-never-should-have-been like Roddy Doyle so that people with a minimum of two two cats and three New Yorker tote bags can pretend he's funny, but they don't believe that any more than I do.
This is how these things work. So how about a prose off between a new Barry story in The New Yorker, and a brand new story I just finished this morning?
Ready? This is from the start of Barry's "Finistère."
The big man was in a condition of thrilling remorse. He was brokenhearted again at fifty-five and loving it. He leaned against the rail on the top deck of the Cork-Roscoff ferry and shook woefully from side to side his heavy, handsome ginger head and the cries of a seal pup rose softly from the hollows of his chest. Sylvia had been abandoned that morning in County Clare and would get over him before the leaves were off the trees; Cian John Wynn would never get over himself. He raised his head and wiped away the tears and watched Ireland recede into the afternoon haze and he prayed that it would stay there. He knew it would be a long time before he went home again.
It was early September in a fine spell. The day was calm and the Celtic Sea ran smoothly on streaks of white-gray lustre. He walked the deck in a bliss of painful nostalgia—the ferry felt as if it had sailed directly from the nineteen-eighties. There was the same old idiot noise of the arcade games from below, and Dexys Midnight Runners still played on the Tannoy, and a gaggle of French and Irish teen-agers in high-waisted denim worked up their flirtations in the giddy-making salt breeze—they had fifteen hours yet to Finistère.
He descended the decks to escape the hormones. He had a widow’s peak and a weakness for contemporary tweeds. He found a quiet corner at Le Café and took a red wine. His moods were swift and ever changing and the thrill of his escape fell away now on a quick grade to emptiness. A familiar void opened up within. He gave out to himself a little and then some more and in fact for a while he argued half seriously against his own existence. Then he gathered his resources somewhat. He drank slowly and judiciously. He tried to read his novel but the words would not fix on the page. Soon a slight girl of about fourteen or fifteen years sat at the table nearest to him. She flipped open a MacBook and scowled into it for a few moments and then looked vaguely in his direction.
“Wi-Fi’s bullshit,” she said.
“Ah, right,” he said.
“I mean, even the fucking Netflix won’t stream?”
He smiled sadly in understanding and returned to his Rachel Cusk but still the words swam and he became quite tense as the girl tapped at the keys and mumbled darkly and much too quickly.
“The gouging bastards,” she said. “What it is is they’re charging, like, a premium rate for a connection you can actually stream off, like fifteen fucking euros?”
A bit off, he thought. Some kind of spectrum. He tried not to engage but couldn’t help himself.
“What’s it you’re trying to watch?”
“ ‘World’s Toughest Prisons,’ ” she said. “Season 7 just dropped.”
He knew not to continue the conversation. A man travelling alone in his morbid fifties does not talk to a girl in her teens without family or guardian in sight, especially not in this black romantic mood and certainly not with a bottle of Château Despair on the go.
“What did you make of Season 6?” he said. “Like that Bosnia and Herzegovina ep?”
“Aw, man,” she said. “Those Slav cats get fucking medieval, yeah?”
For the first time she smiled and it was a wide-open and beautiful and death-defying smile.
Riveting stuff, man. When do we get to see you do the exact same thing again?
These people are so fake and so simple and so superficial that when they see "real life Irish words!" they think of how wise and well-travelled and global they are. Worldly.
Trust me: These morons would have patted themselves on the back and fake-swooned when they saw that Dexys Midnight Runners reference from someone as mediocre as they are, and thus not a threat to their vanity, illusions, and ego.
You're just dealing with empty-headed, soulless, blue-blooded fakers. And fakers love this shit from whomever has been selected as that person they're supposed to pretend to care about.
Now for that other half of the prose off. This is from the start of "May Showers."
Sometimes when I’m in bed and it’s raining, and it feels like no one else is awake or even alive to listen in, I think the rain against the window is her voice.
“Mom,” the rain says, “You can hear me, can’t you? I’ll find you when you get here. Please go and live.”
She never used words because she didn’t have words to use yet, but I tell myself, This could be her, this is how she’s reaching out, these thoughts aren’t yours, she’s talking to you, don’t dismiss it just in case.
It was raining when the ambulance came and raining when we got to the hospital. I was wet and she stayed dry, like we were already in different worlds.
I don’t know how long she’d been lying that way, I answered for every time they asked. I didn’t tell them I hadn’t had a drink since she was born until that night. Like I didn’t want to contradict them if they were thinking I’d been evil for my whole life.
I remember a sign on the wall from kindergarten that was made from cut-out construction paper letters by an enthusiastic teacher—she must have done it, because it wasn’t any of us—that read, "April showers bring May flowers,” in the gayest pinks, blues, and yellows. Colors that all but smiled at you.
Then May came that year and there was more rain and I didn’t see any flowers. And you know what I thought? Something's wrong. Something has been gotten wrong. But I didn't know by who or by what.
I’ve never forgotten that, but I can’t remember when I learned that someday I would die. It seems that it should have been around this time, because if it was in first grade instead, I feel like I would have been a very slow child, or else a child who believed in life eternal, whatever form it took, and I'm sure I was not a child on such a plane. I wasn’t even thinking about anyone else but me. That I could be a keeper of someone else’s life.
Oh dear. That's not very close, is it? You mean it's not true that I've never written anything as good as that Kevin Barry story? No?! You don't say? We're not supposed to believe that? What????
You never know what you're going to get from me. Each time it's going to be something different. Something of pure invention. Of depth that fosters empathy and connection.
And guess what I'm not? I'm not a woman. And I'm not a woman who lost a child. And I'm not a woman who listens to the voice in the rain. It's like a miracle, right, that someone could actually invent something--what a concept!--and have it be so real. Imagine that!
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