“The Pub with No Beer”
by Kevin Barry
from the April 11, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
Oh nice, another favorite is showing up in The New Yorker! Hopefully this means he is working on another story collection to follow up the the three he’s given us so far: There Are Little Kingdoms (2007), Dark Lies the Island (2012), and That Old Country Music (2020). I think I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve read from him, though it took me some time. The first time I read “Fjord of Hillary,” his first story to show up in The New Yorker, I really didn’t get much from it. I have since reread it and really enjoyed it a lot.
It looks like we are returning to a seaside pub for this one!
He hadn’t noticed the voices at first. In the endless stretch of the afternoon he entered the pub through the side door with a soft hushed aspect as if broaching a place of burial. It was late March by now, the clocks about to change, and the first heat of the year was intimated when he raised the blinds a few inches to allow the sunlight through. He did so as to show the place up. The effect of the light was to insinuate life. The motes of dust in the sunbeams were life. He opened the windows a fraction to freshen the air and looked out—
The bay was filling on a neap tide and the Stags of Broadhaven thrust at the clear white skies in raucous appeal.
I hope you’re all starting April out with some springtime cheer. Please feel free to leave your thoughts on the story below!
Lyrical, subtle treatment of the COVID lockdown.
This story is a study on dopey, redundant navel-gazing. It is all bad. It is all wrong. How did fiction about boring old people doing nothing become so lauded and revered? This author is a self-righteous chum who only lives in mirrors. His adverbs are pure murder. Gothically, it cannot be! Do something real, you fossilized imitation of a washed-up 20th century oxygen thief.
I didn’t get the story, but I thought it was well wreitten and atmospheric. Could be about COVID, But that’s used as a pretext for a review of this man’s history.
Trevor, I’m surprised you didn’t block Gavin’s comment. I would back you up if you did. Comments like his are totally unhelpful.
You and I are on the same page, Ken. Last week, after reading this comment, I blocked him but I left the comment up. I didn’t mention that here, though I should have! I don’t block many people (a handful in the whole history of this site), but after a handful of comments and a warning from me that they were not conducive to discussion and were not the tone I want to have, I did block Gavin.
I will support you on that.
Hi, did you say “Ken” when you meant “William”? It’s Ken!
I really liked this and thought it was perfect. The way time is fungible under COVID (definitely it is about it–social distancing is mentioned for instance) and how this man’s memory starts wandering through the ghosts of old conversations struck me as beautifully realized here. I like how class plays a role here as he has a petit-bougeois desire for respectability and civility. I kept thinking of Joyce’s famous quote “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake::–here it’s about all that keeps our bartender moored.
Ha ha! Yes, I guess so! Or maybe I just knew you needed to chime in! Apologies to both!
No problem. I appreciate very much you keeping this site up and providing this forum.
No apology needed, Trevor. As Ken said, you keep it all running.
Ken, I don’t know what you mean about time being fungible under covid. It’s felt normal to me. I don’t mean the situation’s normal — my whole family has worn masks, gotten shots, and reduced travel. I just mean time has felt normal. Perhaps the man in the story feels that time is all melted together because he has a pub, in which many memories dwell.
I don’t know if this would help but I think the pandemic blocks out time such as if you worked at a job for the last 5 years. There are 2 years that appear almost blank because either you weren’t at work or practically noone else was at work when you were and you interacted with very few people for almost 2 years. Maybe there was a maitre’d you saw a lot and then never saw at all for almost 2 years which is a long time. Then that two year gap maybe made you question everything about your life. What was worth it and what wasn’t. What did you have to endure and what could you have changed or what might you want to change? That probably varies a lot among everyone and might be difficult to configure into a relatable short story. Some readers might relate to a particular story and some might not. But it is probably good see the idea of it in a short story because it is something some people have thought about or think about or maybe find themselves thinking about anyway.
I haven’t noticed time being as unusual for me as other people have. This is something discussed a lot in essays or articles and I know people who feel this way. That’s why I made that comment when discussing this story. Larry does a very good job explaining this phenomenon above.
Ken,
Thanks for the compliment. It’s true that many people perceive the passage of time differently. Sometimes that’s good because just living life is ultimately more important than over-analyzing it because no matter what, it keeps going, rolling along even if momentarily interrupted by a near disaster. At the end of the day it is what it is and some people forget the good parts which were enjoyed and then slipped from view. There are nautical pictures and imagery that bring a more long term perspective to this story. There is the “neap tide” which means the point at which the water alone the shore surrounding a bay is least affected by the moon and goes in and out of the bay with the least amount of change between high and low tide over a 24 hour period. Tide is high = life is good. Tide is low = life is not so good. And the closed bar sort of suggests an empty bay like Oyster Bay on Long Island on a winter day with no boats, no people and no moorings and no wind. The water is flat on a cold winter day. So metaphorically, no matter what happens, it all kind of blends into the same for everyone or so the metaphor suggests, so this story is probably about more than the pandemic for its narrator. The story is very Irish with its concentration on pubs and middle class thoughtful people. Though this seems an Irish story, coincidently in the 60s, 70s and 80s there were lots of pubs in the middle class villages and little towns along Long Island that have mostly disappeared as the population there became gentrified as the middle class declined and the gap between rich and poor became larger which is in some ways a nationwide occurrence. So this story is very old school but it points to how things have changed, lamenting how some lady can’t keep away from being preoccupied with her cellphone. A cellphone is somewhat of a remote electronic pub of sorts for middle class people on which the conversation has become not so friendly as it might have been in the past at an actual pub. My favorite part of this story is the narrator’s perception that the conversation over the “pub” of the worldwide web has become more harsh and confrontational: “The voices of more recent times had been an affront to him. They offered themselves baldly as affront; their bodies were arranged barward in aspects of affront. The voices of recent times, he felt, were colored by avarice and vulgarity.” The tone of that statement is so mildly restrained like a middle class person trying to hold on to how things used to be. So there might be more to the somewhat blandish quality of this story than it might at first suggest. Then again, it a great way to describe this particular narrator and how he feels about life. This story sprung more to life for me the more I thought about it after reading the above comments. But it might not be the usual kind of New Yorker short story that readers expected.
I am about as far from an Irish barkeep as one can get, yet, I related to the story wholeheartedly in its tone of regret, wonder, and memory. I have been thinking about how writers (film-makers, playwrights) will treat the pandemic (will people in the movies of the time wear masks?) and what I appreciate here is how it both is and is not about the specific time period, but is immediately recognizable if you want it to be, otherwise a story of memories and regrets and the mysteries of human behavior (did the O’Casey take the glass?). A line in the story became my favorite only after I read the first comment in this thread: “He had come to that unfortunate age when he believed the young to be savages>’ What could make someone want to write so angry and demeaning a comment? Thank you, Trevor for your stewardship of this site,.