That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry

First published in the UK in 2020; publsished by Doubleday on January 12, 2021

Most of the nine stories collected in That Old Country Music are set in western Ireland. They are sweet and sad, funny and tragic. Many are stories are of people in transition surrounded by an unchanging landscape. When a Roma child who speaks no English runs away from Dublin, she loses her fear after meeting an aging hermit in the Ox Mountains and adopts his contemplative life of books and solitude.

Many of the characters are ungrounded. One narrator tells us: “Sometimes I’m not sure what century I’ve mistaken this one for and I wonder would I be better off elsewhere and in other times.” Others, like the hermit, know exactly where they belong.

One story tells of a song that the narrator hears an old man sing in a nursing home — a song of heartbreak and meanness that tells a story of “erotic wickedness and greed.” Another offers a bartender’s perspective on an overheard conversation between an elderly woman and her aging son — the latest iteration of the same conversation that they have been having for years, until it comes to a bad end.

It is difficult to pick a favorite from this variety of gems, but here are a few that are memorable:

A girl of seventeen (“She was almost eighteen and aching to have a fuck before it”) seduces an English junkie who has gone “astray in the head.” Despite the fierceness of her father’s judgment when word of the scandal leaks, she feels empowered by the knowledge that the man was made to leave the town and will think of her when he “seeks again the needle’s tip and solace.”

A garda, three weeks from retirement, fears that a young nemesis who has been spreading babies across the Ox mountains, not always with the consent of the women he impregnated, will feel no constraints after being diagnosed with a cancerous tumor. The garda senses that a killing is imminent, but who will the victim be?

A man in Limerick is a “connoisseur of death,” reporting the news of every local who dies, lamenting them all as his city disappears around him. He chats about celebrity deaths, points out potentially fatal hazards, causes people who do not want to confront the inevitable to cross the street when they see him. He is “impressed by death” and by the knowledge that the only death he will be unable to report to others is his own.

The most darkly amusing story is “Roethke in the Bughouse,” set in 1960 when the American poet Theodore Roethke was committed to a psychiatric hospital in western Ireland. Roethke was troubled by the “bits of sheep everywhere” on the island where he stayed, a “mutton necropolis.” The poet was tormented by long nights filled with occult music, but perhaps he was tormented most of all by the words that demanded escape from his body.

As is often true of Irish writers, Kevin Barry has a gift for language. His sentences are those of a skilled artisan. “He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feelings.” “To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only a specter of losing it.” “He had the hunted look of rural poverty.” “Anxiety folds away its arbitrary music.” A wandering man tells his life story to an unkempt dog, “a dog that has seen some weather.”

I loved Barry’s novel Night Boat to Tangier. I suspect he labors long over each sentence he creates. He may not be the most prolific Irish writer, but he’s among the most exquisite prose stylists.

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Turning Point by Jeffery Deaver

Published digitally by Amazon Original Stories on January 19, 2021

Coming in at more than 60 pages, “Turning Point” is a longish short story in Amazon’s series of original stories. The story is a standalone that features none of Jeffery Deaver’s popular series characters.

A serial killer has murdered three women. After he tortures his victims, he leaves a Russian nesting doll at the scene of his crimes. Capturing the killer requires a creative plan that I won’t spoil.

The most interesting of the story’s characters is a fellow named Michael Stendhal. Michael is a jerk and a bully. Even apart from his criminal tendencies, he’s just mean. He goes on a date and belittles the woman who meets him for leaving her daughter home alone. In a dispute over who got to a taxi first, he asks a woman why she dresses her daughter like a slut, a strategy that gets him the cab when the daughter flees in tears. Michael is not a people person but he likes himself just fine.

A police detective named Ernest Neville seems to be playing a collateral role in the story as he searches for the killer, even after he finds a nesting doll on his property. Yet roles played by characters evolve as the story evolves. Multiple characters are not what they seem to be.

The character with whom the reader spends the most time is unlikable, but that doesn't detract from the story's pleasure. With a tongue-in-cheek attitude, the story asks whether assholes play a useful role in society. Deaver knows that the answer is either “no” or “rarely,” although assholes will likely have a different answer. Given the prevalence of self-satisfied jerks in America, the question is timely. Jerks do seem to think they’re serving a useful purpose by annoying the crap out of everyone they meet.

The story takes multiple twists, using misdirection that makes it difficult for the reader to guess what will happen next. Crime fiction fans have grown accustomed to Deaver’s ability to create intriguing characters and surprising plots. “Turning Point,” while not as weighty as Deaver’s longer work, accomplishes those ends.

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The Shortest Day by Colm Tóibín

Published digitally by Amazon on November 3, 2020

“The Shortest Day” is a short story that is easily consumed in less than an hour. The story is available through Amazon as a “Kindle edition.”

Professor O’Kelly, an archeologist, has spent his career investigating an ancient burial chamber at Newgrange. As a scholar, O’Kelly focuses on facts supported by evidence. He does not speculate about things he cannot prove. When people ask him about spirits of the dead people who were buried in the tomb, he reminds them that spirits are beyond the remit of an archeologist.

What O’Kelly does not know is that spirits do dwell within the chamber. The spend their afterlives telling each other stories. Only one spirit, a woman named Dalc, is able to add new information to their collective knowledge because only she can leave the tomb and roam around in the world.

Once a year, on the winter solstice, a beam of light illuminates the chamber. The spirits are sustained by the light — it renews their energy — but they do not want the outside world to invade their resting place. “We need to be separate from the mortal world,” a spirit argues. “No one ever planned that this sacred space might be shared with anyone.”

In her only contact with a mortal, motivated by fear that archeologists would discover the beam of light, Dalc told a villager that the annual illumination of the chamber is a secret “that does not belong to the world.” Dalc explained that “we must all know our place in the great scheme of things. We respect mystery and silence and spirit.”

Dalc made the villager swear to keep people away from the tomb on the solstice. The villager took her vow seriously. While current villagers are aware that the winter solstice is the one day the tomb is not to be disturbed, the secret has not spread beyond the community. Until, that is, a drunken villager rambled about it while O’Kelly was visiting a local tavern.

When O’Kelly chooses the solstice for one of his visits, the villagers fret that the spirits will be disturbed. By the story’s end, the reader will be invited to ponder the impact of O’Kelly’s discovery.

The foundation of this story is true, in that Michael O’Kelly did discover the phenomenon in 1967. Why the tomb was designed to illuminate on the shortest day of the year is unknown. The illumination clearly required careful planning and ingenious design. According to the Newgrange website (the place is a tourist attraction now), locals did tell stories about the annual lighting of the chamber, although they didn’t reveal exactly when it would happen.

I always admire Colm Tóibín’s prose and his ability to create atmosphere. Like all of Tóibín’s work, the story is interesting and thought provoking. What thoughts Tóibín intended to provoke is something of a mystery to me. Perhaps, as an Irish writer, he couldn’t resist writing a ghost story and that’s all there is to it. But I have struggled to reconcile the spirits’ fear with the story’s ending, which seems to suggest that the fears were groundless. If the lesson learned by the fretful spirits is supposed to teach a larger lesson, it eludes me. Surely not all fears are groundless.

O’Kelly’s lucky discovery enriched the living by revealing an amazing bit of ancient engineering. I suspect Tóibín’s point is that unscientific fears harbored by villagers should give way to the revelations of science. That interpretation might permit the light illuminating the chamber to be seen as light that chases away the dark fears of superstition. But maybe not. Maybe I’m only projecting my own frustration with people who reject reason and science. In any event, I like the story. Maybe it’s my dimness that prevents me from fully appreciating it, but the fact that a story is challenging isn’t a reason not to recommend it.

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The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley

Published by Grove Press on September 15, 2020

Walter Mosley is known for crime fiction that has the depth, complexity, and prose style of literary novels. The protagonist in the story “Haunted” submitted 1,000 stories to literary journals. Each was rejected because of its “genre” themes. Perhaps Mosley wrote that story as a reminder that fiction of literary quality can still engage themes that are common to genre fiction. Mosley’s fans (and fans of other extraordinary writers of genre fiction) understand that a literary work does not cease to be literary because its characters are not upper middle-class New Yorkers who spend their time regretting failed marriages while doing little to interest readers who are not upper middle-class New Yorkers in failed marriages.

Notwithstanding Mosley’s excellence as a writer of crime fiction, most of the stories in this collection do not fit within a genre. These are stories of life. The protagonists are educated black men of varying ages. Some work for banks or insurance companies. Others are professors. They are awkward for many reasons. The younger ones are uncertain of how they might fit into the world. The older ones don’t know how to talk to women or bosses. Some are insecure. One feels “sure that any woman who showed any interest in me were the ones who had given up, deciding that they’d never get the kind of man they’d really wanted.” When a woman does seem to take an interest in that character, she turns out to be a thief.

Many of the men have been betrayed by women in various ways, although the long-married salesman in “The Letter” is getting over the end of his third affair. Some of the men are going through a crisis, wondering about their relationships or the purpose of their lives. They often question themselves, wonder about the choices they made. Sometimes they question their faith in humanity.

Some of the men struggle with their place in a society that holds them apart. They are burdened by the complexity of life, incapable of glib or superficial responses to social or workplace situations. A man who feels “stuck” has two therapists and lies to them both.

The men are often philosophers, some drawing on the classics and others on the street to inform a perspective on purpose and meaning. Some of the men decide it is time to make a break from the past and to begin a new life. One protagonist, pondering the concept of equilibrium and balance, renounces everything material and, like a Buddhist monk, becomes a beggar during an interval in his search for identity. Another quits his job, walking away from a retirement package, and invites a woman he barely knows to join him as he travels to Italy. Yet another resists a promotion because he wonders whether the position will have a corrupting influence on his life.

Only a couple of stories in this collection might be a comfortable fit within genre fiction. “The Sin of Dreams” involves a murder trial, but it flirts with a common science fiction theme by imaging the transfer of data from a brain to digital storage.  The story asks whether a human soul exists independently of memories and explores the ramifications of replacing natural with synthetic bodies. The writer in “Haunted” dies angry and unpublished. He returns as a ghost to pay for his “small-minded, selfish ways.” It takes years of death to learn how to let go of the anger that consumed him in life.

Mosley’s stories dig into the heart of life. They are heartwarming and heartbreaking. Some of the protagonists have suffered a run of hard luck. Some have fathers who are killers or brawlers. Some of the men might have responded to adversity with alcohol or silence. They might lose hope for a while, but in the end, they might find a reserve of strength that helps them carry on.

Each story in this collection is thought-provoking and each reflects the intelligence and compassion that is emblematic of Mosley’s fiction. Mosley drills a deep hole into the interior of his characters to find the humanity that we have so much trouble discovering within ourselves. Decency is a common theme in the stories. Even when they disappoint themselves, characters generally behave decently because that’s how they are wired. Most of the men refuse to be anything less than caring or understanding when the chips are down, no matter how indecently they are treated by others. These awkward black men are, on the whole, models for all men as they confront the awkwardness of living.

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F*ckface by Leah Hampton

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 14, 2020

The stories collected in F*ckface are set in the South, primarily in mountain communities in Appalachia. While the stories resist stereotyping characters as hillbillies (the protagonist in “Sparkle” tells a man that she grew up with indoor plumbing and “even read a few books when I was a kid, when I wasn’t losing my teeth”), many of the characters view outsiders with suspicion. At the same time, outsiders — such as the guide who gives visitors an environmental tour through a nature preserve in “Frogs” — tend to view locals with condescension. The guide admonishes the protagonist for damaging the ecosystem when she falls from the path and lands in the water, crushing some frogs’ eggs, because she didn’t wear the expensive hiking shoes that all the visitors are wearing. Only her twin brother understands that locals aren’t the problem.

The stories generally focus on relationships. The protagonist in “Sparkle” takes her husband’s friend to Dollywood and propositions him because of her long-standing crush and because her husband hasn’t touched her since she started complaining about the sameness in their life. A woman who has been sexting a married man in “Wireless” decides she’s willing to give him whatever he wants, even if she thinks it’s a bit kinky, because she views herself as invisible and doesn’t know when another opportunity will arrive.

Leah Hampton’s characters are a product of their environment and, like the environment, are too often misused. A woman who is approaching menopause fears that the work she once did at “Eastman” Chemical might have caused the lump in her breast. She can’t say anything bad about the company, despite the proliferation of cancer among its employees, because her husband was the company’s director of planning. A woman in “Mingo” argues with her husband about mountaintop removal and wonders if, in thirty years, he’ll look like her father-in-law, who makes her laugh by exposing his naked body in the hospital when she refuses to hand him his pants.

In “Boomer,” a forest fire raging toward Kentucky leaves a firefighter with no time to deal with the woman who is moving out of his life — but then, he never had time and that’s why she’s leaving. He feels like the world is ending, not entirely because of the approaching fire. A park ranger in “Parkway,” having grown tired of finding dead bodies, decides to find a new job while his family still knows his name.

Both home and work relationships are at the heart of “F*ckface,” a story that involves employees of Food Country wondering how their manager (you can guess what the employees call him) will deal with the dead bear in the parking lot. “Queen” uses bees as a metaphor for families; hives break apart and its members scatter or die for reasons that are not always apparent, leaving the person tending the hive to wonder whether she is to blame.

The woman narrating “Saint” in the second person recalls childhood memories of a brother who, when the memories are formed, has not yet died. The memories have turned him into a saint, and make his death a sort of martyrdom that she always anticipated, although she cannot prove that her memories are true. A young woman in “Meat” attends a funeral and thinks about a barn fire that killed hundreds of pigs during her college internship, prompting her to change her major.

My favorite story, “Devil,” describes a visit home by a 32-year-old Air Force tech sergeant shortly before his post-9/11 deployment to Bagram. Remembering the harsh discipline imposed by his Bible-quoting father, the tech sergeant still cringes, as he did when he was a child, at his father’s flashes of anger. Both parents condemn their child for his failure to live up to their Christian standards. The story suggests that the damage done to a child by parents who mistake discipline for love can never be undone.

F*ckface is a solid collection of stories, each managing to address Appalachian living and relationships in a different way. Other than “Devil,” none of the stories struck me as being special, but none of the stories struck me as being a waste of time, which sets the book ahead of most short story collections. I appreciated the complexity of the conflict between eco-friendly characters and those who need jobs, the kind of conflict that pits Appalachian residents against “outsiders” while sometimes tearing families or couples apart. I also appreciated the recognition that religion is a force that holds some Appalachian families together while destroying others.

Leah Hampton writes with a sure hand, seemingly certain of the story she wants to tell. She tells the story without a wasted word. That clarity of purpose adds power to stories that showcase large issues through small moments in ordinary lives.

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