That Old Country Music

by Kevin Barry

Overview

From the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier, one of the New York Times's Ten Best Books of 2019, come stories of rural Ireland in the classic Irish mode: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today.

All of Kevin Barry's prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. In this new collection, we encounter a gallery of west Ireland character poised on the cusp between hope and disaster: a forlorn and sensitive young man favoring art films and "by no means setting the night on fire" takes romantic aim at a mysterious Polish waitress in "The Coast of Leitrim"; a morbid town crier hounds the main drag of Limerick with the inevitable greeting "Did you hear who died?" in the drolly comic "Who's-Dead McCarthy"; and in the title story, a pregnant young woman waits anxiously in a van while her older fiancé undertakes, no doubt unwisely, robbing a petrol station with a claw hammer.

Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101911358
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	242,713
Product dimensions:	5.17(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

KEVIN BARRY is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane and the story collections Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. His awards include the International Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award. His stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, Granta, and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland.

Read an Excerpt

The Coast of Leitrim

 

Living alone in his dead uncle’s cottage, and with the burden lately of wandering thoughts in the night, Seamus Ferris had fallen hard for a Polish girl who worked at a café down in Carrick. He had himself almost convinced that the situation had the dimensions of a love affair, though in fact he’d exchanged no more than a few dozen words with her, whenever she named the price for his flat white and scone, and he shyly paid it, offering a line or two himself on the busyness of the town or the fineness of the weather.

 

“It’s like France,” he said to her one sunny morning in June. 

 

And it was true that the fields of the mountain had all the week idled in what seemed a Continental languor, and the lower hills east were a Provençal blue in the haze, and the lake when he lowered himself into it was so warm by the evening it didn’t even make his midge bites sting. 

 

“The heat,” he tried again. “Makes the place seem like France. We wouldn’t be used to it. Passing out from it. Ambulance on standby.”

 

His words blurted at the burn of her brown-eyed stare. She didn’t lose the run of herself by way of a response but she said yes, it is very hot, and he believed that something at least cousinly to a smile softened her mouth and moved across her eyes. He had learned already by listening in the café that her name was Katherine, which was not what you’d expect for a Polish woman but lovely.

 

At thirty-five years of age, Seamus Ferris was by no means setting the night on fire at the damp old pebbledash cottage on Dromord Hill, but he had no mortgage nor rent to pay, and there was money from when the father died, a bit more again when the mother went to join him, also the redundancy payment from Rel-Tech, and some dole. He had neither sister nor brother and was a little stunned at this relatively young age to find himself on a solo run through life. He had pulled back from his friends, too, which wasn’t much of a job, for he had never had close ones. He had worked for eight years at Rel-Tech, but more and more he had found the banter of the other men there a trial, the endless football talk, the foolishness and bragging about drink and women, and in truth he was relieved when the chance of a redundancy came up. He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feeling. He drank wine rather than beer and favoured French films. Such an oddity this made him in the district that he might as well have had three heads up on Dromord Hill. 

 

He believed that Katherine, too, had sensitivity. She had a dreamy, distracted air, and there was no question but that she seemed at a remove from the other mulluckers who worked in the café. The way she made the short walk home in the evenings to the apartments across the river in Cortober again named a sensitivity—she always slowed a little to look out and over the water, maybe to see what the weather was doing, perhaps she even read the river light, as Seamus did, fastidiously. He could keep track of her route home if he parked down by the boathouse, see the slender woman with brown hair slow and turn to look over the water, and it was only with a weight of reluctance that she moved on again for home.

 

In the sleepless nights of the early summer his mind ran dangerously across her contours. He played out many scenarios that might occur in the café, or around town, or maybe on a Sunday walk through the fields by the lake. It was a more than slightly different version of himself that acted his part in these happy scenes: Seamus as a confident and blithe man, but also warm and generous, and possessed of a bedroom manner suave enough to ensure that the previously reticent Polish girl concluded his reveries roaring the head off herself in gales of sexual transport. Each morning when he awoke once more in an aroused state—there was no mercy—it was of Katherine from the café that he thought. She was pretty but by no means a supermodel, not like some of the Eastern Europeans, with their cheekbones like blades, and as Seamus was not himself hideous, he felt he might have a chance in forgiving light. All he had to do was string out the few words right in his mouth. 

 

He was in the café by now four or five times a week, and she was almost always on. The once or twice she hadn’t been were occasions of crushing disappointment, and he’d glared hard at the mulluckers, as they bickered and barked like seals over the trays of buns and cakes. Even the hissing spout of the coffee machine was an intense annoyance when Katherine wasn’t there. Along with its delicacy, Seamus’s mind had, too, a criminal tendency—this is often the way—a kind of native sneakiness, though he would have been surprised to have been told this. The café’s toilet was located right by the kitchen, and Seamus could not but notice what looked like a rota pinned to the back of the kitchen door. Catching his breath one Monday morning, he reached in with his phone and took a photograph, and in this way he had her hours for the week got. Also, her full name.

 

 

 

Katherine Zielinski she was called, and he wasn’t back in the van before he had it googled—it might be unusual enough inside quote marks to give quick results, and indeed within seconds he was poring over an Instagram account in her name. The lovely profile picture confirmed her identity—it was his Katherine all right, with her fourteen followers. She had posted only six times, six images, going back to the January previous, and relief flooded through him like an opiate when he found no photos of a boyfriend nor of a baby. It was something more intense than an opiate that went through him when he studied the most recent post, which was from the weekend just gone. It was of Katherine’s right hand resting on the bare thighs revealed by her shortish denim skirt, and in the hand she clutched a slim box set—it was “Tales of the Four Seasons,” four films by Éric Rohmer. Her accompanying caption read, “Goracy weekend.”

 

It was a swift job to go to Google Translate with that and find that it meant, merely, “Hot weekend.” She had humour as well as taste, it appeared, though in truth Seamie Ferris wouldn’t be putting Rohmer at the top of the league in terms of the French directors; he would in fact rate him no more than highish in the second division, but at least he might be able to argue to her a rationale for this. Her knees were lovely and brown, though possibly a little thickset, but as it was a case of mother fist and her five daughters up in the pebbledash cottage, this was not a deal-breaker.

 

He spent time with the other images. He tried to decipher them or, more exactly, to decipher from them something of her character. Her only other personal appearance was in a blurry selfie that showed her reflection in a rain-spattered windowpane and that was suggestive, somehow, of Katherine as a solitary. There was a poor vista of the river from the bridge at evening. The rest of the images were reposted from other accounts—someone’s pencil drawing of Sufjan Stevens; a cityscape that might have been of the Polish winter, its streetlights a cold amber; and, finally, a live shot of Beyoncé at a concert in Brazil in the stance of some new and utterly undefeatable sexual warrior. These images spoke to Seamus Ferris, in a low, insistent drone, of a yearning he recognised, and he felt that now he should end his playacting and confide his feelings to the woman.

Editorial Reviews

ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Named a most anticipated book of the year by Vulture, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Post, Literary Hub, The Millions, and more*

"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."
—NPR

"I had to quit reading this book the first day I had it in my hands, just so I could have it to read the next day. It's that good."
—Richard Ford

“Coarse and lyrical, arresting and often hilarious. There are verbal titillations and delights on nearly every page, but also an undertow of sorrow…Barry’s old country music cuts deep into the reader’s heart.”
—Washington Post

"Splendid...Easygoing in their elegance and capacious in their emotional range, these stories draw naturally from Ireland’s literary tradition without becoming distorted by nostalgia or homage."
—Wall Street Journal

"Kevin Barry’s new collection of melodic and melancholy short stories, set against the harsh, majestic landscape of the Irish countryside, conjures a dark and richly textured world haunted by history. Read slowly and savor." 
—Vulture

"There are no bad Kevin Barry books. There are no sedate Kevin Barry books. Every darkly-soulful tragicomedy he produces—be it a novel or a short story collection—is a wild, electrified beast of language that throws you up on its back as it dances with manic glee around the lonesome, haunted west of Ireland landscape…The stories in That Old Country Music have all the hypnotic pathos and inimitable linguistic verve of Barry at his very best."
—LitHub

"Barry’s style [is] a nervy mix of high poetry and low comedy that he applies with unceasing vigor."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Barry’s new collection creates its own literary language, blending a deep humanity with mordant humor."
—O, The Oprah Magazine

"Barry skillfully blends humor and pathos...An inspired, evocative book."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Barry has the right stuff for short stories. He brings characters to life quickly and then blesses them with his uncanny ear for dialogue and prose rhythms, his compassion and wry wit…Exceptional writing and a thoroughly entertaining collection.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

"The multi-award-winning Barry (Night Boat to Tangier) dazzles with his word wizardry and the effortless grace of his perfect sentences.”
—Library Journal

"Stellar...The hallmarks of Mr. Barry’s writing are in evidence here, from the earthy dialogue to his many poetic descriptions."
―Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"The master short story teller turns messy emotions into riveting tales of wounded Irish folk...One of the best collections you'll read this year."
―Sunday Times (UK)

"Wild, witty stories...The west of Ireland teems with canny characters and vivid language...Darkly glimmering...Their language is exhilarating, its verve evoking the very best of Barry's compatriots while further carving out a territory that's all his own."
―Observer (UK)

"Barry often writes with sonorous wisdom...but as readers of his grimly hilarious novels will know, his language is just as precise when it is in the service of comedy...Exhilaratingly funny and poignant fables."
―Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"These playful, serious and beautifully crafted stories allow Barry to experiment as we need great writers to do."
―Irish Times

"An extraordinary writer . . . In his short stories Barry seems most fully and brilliantly himself. . . . So rich and so flawlessly crafted―its best stories feel instantly canonical, as if we've already been reading them for years . . . The opening story is letter-perfect from its first line . . . Funny, moving, built with superior economy, this is the real thing . . . Barry remains the great romantic of contemporary Irish fiction. Like all of the most interesting artists, he gets better with every risk he takes. The courage may be his. But the rewards are all ours."
―Irish Independent

From the Publisher

10/05/2020

Irish writer Barry follows Night Boat to Tangier with a rather mixed story collection. “The Coast of Leitrim” and “Deer Season” tread well-worn romantic territories, depicting doomed and all-too familiar relationships. “Who’s-Dead McCarthy,” about a morbid townie chatterbox, is entertaining, yet it ends with a punch line that falls flat. On the other hand, the title story, which follows a pregnant teen as she waits for her criminal fiancé to return from a robbery, pulses with electricity and emotion, despite its abrupt conclusion. “Toronto and the State of Grace” showcases the author’s gift for dialogue and wit, as a brash son and his elderly mother hold court in a sleepy pub, drinking their way through the pub’s liquor and showering the barkeep with stories. And “Roma Kid” transforms what initially seems to be a depressing runaway child story into a fairy tale of finding family and purpose. As always, Barry can’t write a bad sentence (“A light rain began to fall and it spoke more than anything else of the place through which she moved”), but the too-tepid stories don’t do justice to the author’s considerable talents. This won’t go down as one of Barry’s finer works. Agent: Lucy Luck, C&W. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 08/01/2020

Sit a spell with stories set in and around County Sligo, Ireland. Many of the characters here are solitary souls looking for some human connection—among them, a loner who becomes obsessed with a Polish waitress, a boarding school girl setting her sights on a local hermit with whom she plans to lose her virginity, and an old cop in his last weeks at work, determined to bring down a notorious reprobate. In "Who's-Dead McCarthy?" McCarthy is a grim reaper of a fellow who delights in stopping people in the street to impart news of any recent death, whether local or from the world at large. In the title story, about a small-time robbery gone awry, Barry layers surprise upon surprise as a pregnant 17-year-old awaits her fiancé in the getaway car. As may be expected, drink plays a prominent role in these stories, especially in "Toronto and the State of Grace," when a mother and son arrive near closing time at a nearly empty pub determined to work their way across an entire shelf of spirits while they regale the weary bartender with tales of their raucous lives. VERDICT The multi-award-winning Barry (Night Boat to Tangier) dazzles with his word wizardry and the effortless grace of his perfect sentences. Highly recommended.—Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Library Journal

★ 2020-10-27
Tales of love, lust, and country life by the gifted Irish writer.

It’s spring or summer in western Ireland in most of these 11 stories. The whitethorn—or hawthorn, which helps the heart, say herbalists—may be “decked over the high fields as if for the staging of a witch’s wedding.” And love appears throughout, romantic, familial, injurious, magical, morbid. A man drives away his lover for the painfully familiar reason that he can’t imagine “what kind of a maniac could fall for the likes of me.” A young woman who targets a man to take her virginity before she returns to boarding school feels a new sense of power when he is run out of town. A man inherits a cottage that seems to make him irresistible to women, but while he’s Don Juan under that roof, “elsewhere I was, as ever, a bag of spanners.” A collector of old western Irish songs is startled by one in which a married woman seduces a herdsman so she can regale her husband with descriptions of her victim’s besotted state. A pregnant 17-year-old waits in a van while her fiance is supposedly off robbing a gas station to finance their elopement, but here “the whitethorn blossom…made an ominous aura as it moved in the wind.” Barry has the right stuff for short stories. He brings characters to life quickly and then blesses them with his uncanny ear for dialogue and prose rhythms, his compassion and wry wit. Most intriguing is one that opens with a dead whitethorn and has Theodore Roethke in an Irish psychiatric hospital (as he was in 1960), bantering with an earnest doctor while the poet’s mordant interior monologue adds a subtext on madness and creativity.

Exceptional writing and a thoroughly entertaining collection.

Kirkus Reviews