The Heart in Winter

By Kevin Barry

Doubleday 2024

Kevin Barry, the author of Night Boat to Tangier and a man who doesn’t believe in quotation marks (maybe he’s concerned about printing costs), begins his new novel about Irish romance in the American West  with a description of a mad man: “some crazy old meathead in a motley of rags and filthy buckskin, wild tufts of hair sticking out the ears, the eyes burning now like hot stars, now clamped shut in a kind of ecstasy, and he lurched and tottered on broken boots like a nightmare overgrown child….” 

From the first sentence of The Heart in Winter, readers will notice that Kevin Barry has an extremely distinctive, colloquially eloquent writing style, very different from the bland, MFA-mass-produced prose so common in modern novels. His sentences can be long and chatty but also have a satisfying economy of language. Neat turns of phrase like “There was as much sky in the shack as roof,” and (of a drunkard) “He rose and wavered on woozy legs. He was operated by an inept puppeteer” pop up every now and then. But there is also a certain nihilism behind Kevin Barry’s prose—almost a flippancy—that makes the prose seemingly discount itself, as if it thought, “Tell a story? What the heck does it matter anyway?” This creates a sense of emptiness about the novel, but that feeling is somewhat fitting for the fatalistic, pitiful tale that Kevin Barry has to tell.

The Heart in Winter opens in 1891 in the small mining town of Butte, Montana. The male love-interest is Tom Rourke, a poetic wastrel with no great life occupation and a yearning for romance. The female love-interest is Polly Gillespie, a newcomer to Butte who has recently married a self-flagellating religious fanatic, and who at first appears shy, “inclined for the shadows. If she could seep into the walls of the place she might do.” Polly is unhappy with her marriage, falls in love with Tom, and decides to run away with Tom. The plot advances from here in a fairly predictable way: Polly and Tom steal some cash and a horse, leave town, meet a handful of odd, semi-comical people in the Rocky Mountains, get caught up in a manhunt on their journey to the Pacific coast and romantic freedom, and encounter hardships along the way. (“Happiness,” Tom is told by a Swedish immigrant, “ain’t generally how it works out for folks.”) And Tom, Polly, and everyone they encounter swear liberally and unnecessarily all the journey long. (The Heart in Winter is, after all, a modern novel.)

But despite the interesting prose and fairly fast-paced plot, The Heart in Winter is an uneven piece of workmanship. Much of the plot feels precipitate, and the book’s narrative thrust is rather jolty. Besides their love of profanity, Barry’s characters are distinct enough, but their outlines are all a tad hazy. Barry might have been going for subtle characterization, but he has only managed slightly watered-down characterization. 

Things in The Heart in Winter happen, people get drunk and say cynical things, but none of it is very compelling. The feeling of emptiness that the novel’s tone creates is magnified by the uneven plot and not-fully-realized characters. By the time the story is finished, the reader will be left wishing there had been something more in the novel, more depth and conviction. The book’s prose style will be remembered by the reader, but it is doubtful that much else will.

Spencer Peacock is a student currently living in Utah