Kevin Barry’s Atlantic Drift

Abstract

Kevin Barry is a short story writer, novelist, dramatist, and editor, with Olivia Smith, of Winter Papers, an annual anthology of contemporary Irish writing. His work is steeped in music, film, and television, and echoes with their influence. Underpinning this is an attachment to writers like Dermot Healy and John McGahern, both novelists whose importance to a writer like Barry makes all the more sense from a coastal, and an archipelagic, perspective. His binding theme is disappointment and his lyricism is braided into the tragic perspective his characters, and his narrators, have of the human condition, which is for the most part a tilting balance between anxiety and drink. These edgy narratives are often set in wet weather by the sea and as so often in this book, the coastal margin operates as a hydroscape in which the boundaries between innocence and experience fragment and shift.