WILD HOUSES, by Colin Barrett
In Raymond Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance?,” a man whose wife has left him places the entirety of their home on his front lawn, arranged as it was on the inside, as an act of defiant despair. A young couple, referred to only as the boy and the girl, come along and presume the man is holding a yard sale. They barter for the haunted detritus of a failed marriage, and later the girl senses what the boy never does — that their life together may one day mirror that of the man and his unseen ex-wife.
I thought often of that story while reading Colin Barrett’s heartbreaker of a debut novel, “Wild Houses,” which is set over a single weekend in the small Irish town of Ballina, in County Mayo. Crowds have arrived for the annual Salmon Festival, and 17-year-old Nicky Hennigan, who works as a waitress at the Pearl Hotel, is facing a gantlet of shifts without a day off when her boyfriend, Doll English, disappears.
Doll has been kidnapped by Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, two brothers of “tired malice” who have a seemingly limitless potential for gutter violence. The Ferdia brothers have brought Doll, unannounced, to the home of Dev Hendrick, a somewhat gentle giant who lives in rural isolation with Georgie, a dog who mostly ignores him.
Everyone seems to ignore Dev or take him for a simpleton or, ironically, given his size, a weakling. As he becomes the unwitting host of a poorly planned ransom demand, he’s given opportunity to reflect on a life lived less in quiet desperation than in desperate passivity. Given to panic attacks that begin with a “cold, almost ecstatic, shiver … along the nape of his neck” and turn his throat into a “shrinking keyhole,” Dev might be the only hope Doll has to walk out of the house alive. But how does a man somewhat addicted to inaction pick the correct moment to act?
The Ferdia brothers have kidnapped Doll because his brother, Cillian, a feckless and failed drug dealer, owes them 18,000 euros after drugs he stashed on their behalf were destroyed in a natural calamity. Natural calamities of all shapes and sizes abound in “Wild Houses.” So does abandonment: Nicky was raised by a brother after her parents died when she was young; Dev’s beloved mother has recently died while his mentally ill father wanders about town trying to press strangers into laying bets for him at the track; Doll and Cillian were long ago abandoned by their father and left in the care of their mother, Sheila, who has migraines caused by a “sensitivity to light. Too much light, direct light, light above a certain intensity.”
It could be argued that the heart and soul of Irish character, were one to venture into generalities, stem from a sensitivity to light. Certainly, the characters in this novel see very little sun, both metaphorically and practically. Theirs is a gray existence. The houses are cramped, the streets narrow, the vast fields untilled. When Nicky, on her fervent odyssey to find Doll, searches the “quiet and empty” countryside, she finds herself lost in “orders of rural obscurity,” where the land “was holding its tongue and steadfastly averting its gaze.”
Nicky — and her quest — is the soul of this fine novel. She is, like the girl in the Carver story, a creature fumbling and stumbling through her own self-awakening. She knows, with a quiet, somewhat tragic certainty, that she will outgrow this world of pubs and cigarettes and fatalism. She will leave all of it and the people she loves behind. In this way, she is a portrait of survivor’s guilt before the guilt — or the surviving — has occurred.
With Dev, the other pole of fractured decency in this inhospitable environment, Nicky shares an acute isolation buried deep in the body. She wanders as if the soul or alien divine — or whatever one calls the intangible essence of a human being — has no twin. No soul mate, no spiritual brethren. What waits for them when the noise or the music stops, when last call is called, is the empty ticking of the self.
All the characters in “Wild Houses” have this fear (even the Ferdia brothers, who meet it with “the unreliability, but also the dangerous decisiveness, of creatures who did not understand their natures and did not care to”). In Colin Barrett’s nimble hands — save for the occasional adverb so obtrusive and unnecessary it muddies what it’s supposed to make clear — the lives of a small collective of mournful souls become vibrant before us, and their yearning is depicted with wistfulness, no small amount of humor and one dangerously ill-tempered goat.
WILD HOUSES | By Colin Barrett | Grove | 255 pp. | $27
