{"id":14730,"date":"2014-12-29T14:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-12-29T18:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=14730"},"modified":"2015-02-03T00:43:35","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T04:43:35","slug":"colin-barrett-the-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2014\/12\/29\/colin-barrett-the-ways\/","title":{"rendered":"Colin Barrett: “The Ways”"},"content":{"rendered":"
Click here<\/a> to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker<\/em> webpage. Colin Barrett's \u201cThe Ways\u201d\u00a0was originally published in the January 5, 2015 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/pre>\n
\"Click<\/a>
Click for a larger image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u201cThe Ways\u201d takes place in contemporary, somewhat rural, somewhat trapped-class Ireland.\u00a0The narrative switches between the orphaned siblings: 23-year-old Nick, 16-year-old Pell (a girl who misses the boys at school), and Gerry, who feels like a 12-year-old boy.\u00a0Things are not going well. The parents finished dying\u00a0two years ago. Pell has quit school: she couldn\u2019t get out of bed on the first day back in September, and now she drinks when and if she pleases. Nick is working an 18-hour day at the kitchen in the down-at-heels hotel in town, serious and sober now after having been pretty wild before his parents died. Gerry gets into scrapes at school and takes a lot of refuge in video games. In his interview with Cressida Leyshon (here<\/a>), Barrett says they are lost in their \u201cimpregnable inarticulacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The characters\u2019 inability to talk with each other extends to their almost equal inability to reflect upon their situation, the exception being Gerry, in a flash, at the end.<\/p>\n
Pell\u2019s inarticulacy seems extended to her inner life; cleverly, she observes that boys \u201ctalk at\u201d her, rather than to her, but that appears to be the limit of our access to her inner existence.\u00a0She appears paralyzed: she cannot get out of bed to go to school, she doesn\u2019t get out of bed after her brothers have gone off for the day. She cannot get up off the ice when she falls on her butt, and she does resist when Nick pulls her out of bed. Although she fixes dinner for her little brother, she cannot convince him to leave his room to come to eat it. She is unconnected, adrift, overwhelmed. The one gleam of hope is that she gets Gerry to admit that he started the fight, and she offers some advice — \u201cthat the world is packed with dickheads\u201d and he\u2019s going to have to \u201cstop rising to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nick is not as frozen as Pell, but he\u2019s mired in his work day and his responsibilities. He does have a human response to a work-mate, observing that while he, Nick, doesn\u2019t approve of Heng changing his name to Sean, Nick realizes it\u2019s a probably effective accommodation to the situation of being an immigrant in Ireland.\u00a0And we see that he brings home the groceries. He sticks with them.<\/p>\n
There is hope, too, given that Pell has waited up for Nick, and they are heard talking, although what they\u2019re saying does not come through.<\/p>\n
Gerry\u2019s a little mess — spending his time fighting, holed up in his room, and playing video games.\u00a0The hope for him is that we overhear him mentally apologizing to Nick and Pell.<\/p>\n
A nice article about Barrett appeared last summer in The Guardian <\/em>shortly after he won the big Frank O\u2019Connor International short story prize for his collection of stories entitled Young Skins<\/em> (here<\/a>). The article (which also has an appealing picture of Barrett) notes that the O\u2019Connor prize has gone in the past to people like Haruki Murakami.<\/p>\n
Barrett is from Ireland, and the story is peppered with the vernacular. Kids who are playing hooky are \u201con the doss,\u201d and a tall, skinny boy looks like a \u201cstring of piss.\u201d There\u2019s \u201cbollocks,” “bumchum,” and bageen,\u201d as well as a \u201cparping\u201d car and a mom the boys call a \u201cmare.\u201d<\/p>\n
I wouldn\u2019t say this is the narrator\u2019s voice, though; the narrator is cool and restrained and reserved. He is merely using accurate language to report the way the kids think, and to also, perhaps, show how their thought is restricted by their language. Barrett is clearly a word-person — he enjoys, for instance, word painting. He draws a teen: \u201cthe scanty lichen of an unthriving mustache clinging to his lip.\u201d He deftly captures another teen: \u201ca comely six-foot string of piss.\u201d\u00a0It doesn\u2019t always work: \u201cShe liked their unwieldy bodies — their hands like hammers and their loaflike feet, the way their Adam\u2019s apples beat like the chests of trapped birds when they talked at her.\u201d I get it — the way all of these characters are trapped, the way Pell reads the boys — but at the same time, the sentence is too much of a good thing.<\/p>\n
What do I think of \u201cThe Ways\u201d?\u00a0I don\u2019t like the title, although there may be an idiomatic slant to it that I am missing.<\/p>\n
The story is more a portrait of a situation than it is a story, and whether you like this depends upon your taste, as does the fact that it has a very gray mood and inconclusive posture. When I think of it, these three kids remind me of some of my high school students — students whose difficult lives I didn\u2019t think would ever change very much, although I hoped their lives might still have sparks of happiness or ecstasy or adventure or love or community.<\/p>\n
One difference, I see, between Barrett and me is that Barrett refuses to succumb to wishful thinking. He is careful, careful, careful. There are no lapses into the lyric and no easy intimations of ecstasy.<\/p>\n
I wonder a little at the choices of this particular story. The story duplicates the situation in Dave Eggers\u2019 \u00a0A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius<\/em>:\u00a0 Eggers had to bring up his younger brother Toph after both his parents died of cancer, the difference being that Eggers had some money and came from, apparently, a different social class. There is a hopeful, crazy energy to the Eggers book, and a sad, gray depression surrounding the Munnellys. Another book that deals with lower class kids being orphaned is the YA classic — The Outsiders<\/em>. And then there is Nick Flynn\u2019s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir<\/em>, all three tales of the orphaned life, and yet each time the result is the writer becomes a successful, award-winning writer. It is as if Barrett has chosen this situation (the orphaned teen) in order to make it clear that becoming a world famous writer is not usually the goal or the outcome. Surviving is the goal.<\/p>\n
Barrett\u2019s kids seem trapped. His intent seems — more Dubliners <\/em>than not, more Jacob Riis than not. The story does depend on small flashes of understanding. Pell does make Gerry admit who started the fight. Nick does arrive home at midnight with groceries. Gerry does know he\u2019s putting Pell and Nick through a wringer. These are the slight threads that keep them all from sinking.<\/p>\n
So I think it\u2019s Barrett\u2019s terrific reserve that interests me, his resistance to narrative malarkey, and, I have to admit, his setting. Reading about faraway people in faraway places who nonetheless seem real is always very compelling to me.<\/p>\n
In a short piece for The Guardian<\/em> (here<\/a>), Barrett calls David Foster Wallace his hero, making the point that beneath the surface of Infinite Jest<\/em> and \u201cits\u00a0almost defensively elaborate postmodern conceits is a novel brimming with extraordinary compassion and\u00a0empathy.\u201d I think \u201cThe Ways\u201d does exemplify an exercise in empathy: Nick and Pell and Gerry are in such a bad way you want to take over and change them, but in fact what Barrett does is allow them to be themselves. He allows them space on his pristine page, and they don\u2019t sully it; they merely awaken us — to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week\u2019s New Yorker<\/em> story is Colin Barrett\u2019s \u201cThe Ways.\u201d Betsy offers her thoughts. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[698,94],"tags":[],"coauthors":[504],"class_list":["post-14730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colin-barrett","category-new-yorker-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Barrett-The-Ways.jpg?fit=876%2C1200&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-3PA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14730"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15120,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14730\/revisions\/15120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14730"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}