Irish fiction is having a moment, again. Such success, though, must bring its own pressures for younger Irish writers. Maybe this explains the eight-year gap between Colin Barrett’s acclaimed debut story collection, Young Skins, and his new set. There are quite a few struggling writers in Homesickness: the depressed poet Bobby, “obsessed with suicidal ideation,” whose three least favourite words are “do you write?”; a novelist called Caber is famous, meaning only “one in every 200 civilians” have heard of him; another character even comments on an aspiring writer: “I’d say Colm Tóibín won’t be quaking in his boots anytime soon.”
But Barrett needn’t feel anxious about his influences. When he’s good, he’s very good—and distinctive, too. “A Shooting in Rathreedane” is a perfectly formed gem following Sergeant Jackie Noonan as she attends to a small-time crook assailed while stealing fuel from a farm. Barrett loves lowlifes. In “The Alps,” three brothers “with massive arses and brutally capable forearms” ride in a Hitachi Hiace with “piebald panelling.” The youngest, Bimbo, turns out to have a surprisingly sensitive side, trying to rub out the obscene graffiti in the men’s toilets about the “lovely” third McIlenden sister.
Certain images will stay with me: Ciara describing her Ayahuasca trip in South America after returning from a funeral mass; schoolboy Gerry getting thoroughly absorbed in the Wild West landscape of a video game. The strongest story, though, is the quietly tragic “The 10,” in which young footballer Danny’s dreams are curtailed when he is cut by Man Utd. “It was an awful thing, maybe the worst thing, to discover that in the end you were only good enough to get far enough to find out that you were not good enough.”
