On the Lam in the Wild West, With Bounty Hunters Trailing

THE HEART IN WINTER, by Kevin Barry

The Irish writer Kevin Barry’s last novel, “Night Boat to Tangier” (2019), was a charmer. It was a word-drunk duet between a couple of aging tramps who dusted off their charisma and performed a bit of the old verbal soft-shoe as they waited in an all-night ferry terminal in Spain for their luck to change.

The heartsick dialogue slipped into comic reverie. “My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Málaga,” was a typical comment. So was, “I haven’t enjoyed a mirror since 1994.” I liked “Night Boat to Tangier” as much as anything I read in that prepandemic year. It made growing old seem (almost) like good, fractious fun.

Barry has a new novel out. It’s called “The Heart in Winter.” This title — earnest, generic, a bit flatulent — is worrisome. Let’s remain calm and proceed to the first page. Let’s remind ourselves that Barry is too shambolic and profane a writer to go squishy on us.

The first sentence is a stemwinder. I won’t print it in full here. I’ll simply note, to provide a general sense of the ambience, that it contains the phrases “crazy old meathead,” “filthy buckskin,” “wild tufts of hair,” “nightmare overgrown child,” “motley of rags,” “lurched and tottered on broken boots,” “massive obliterated eejit child” and “eyes burning now like hot stars.” It ends with a peddler’s ditty:

We are in Barryland all right. His literary influences — James Joyce, Cormac McCarthy and J.P. Donleavy among them — are proudly displayed. Other influences that stream under this novel, I would guess, include John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” The Pogues’ album “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash,” the HBO series “Deadwood” and Dock Boggs’s murder ballad “Pretty Polly.”

“The Heart in Winter” is a western, even though most of its characters are Irish. It’s set in the early 1890s, mostly in Butte, Mont., which one character refers to as a “town of whores and chest infections.”

The plot is minimal. A woman, Polly Gillespie, rides into town to meet a man she has arranged to marry. He’s a faith-addled milquetoast. She does marry him, but falls in love with Tom Rourke, a dope fiend and a poetical soul with a “face on him like a tortured saint.” Tom visits her when the husband is away. He carves her first initial jaggedly into his chest. Their sex is immolating.