Young Skins by Colin Barrett

Every once in a while there comes along a collection of stories that, from cover to cover, inspires, surprises, delights, and astounds me with what the short story is capable of doing.  All too often, many collections have only one or two such memorable stories, while the rest invariably disappoint.  I last felt that cover-to-cover wow factor last summer when I read Nancy Lee's Dead Girls. Before that it was Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, preceded by Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Nam Le's The Boat, Michael Christie's The Beggar's Garden, and Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Those were books that even after I had finished reading them continued to sit beside me on my desk and to which I frequently turned while working on my own stories in an attempt to determine the how of what they did. Recently I was floored again when I read Colin Barrett's Young Skins.

The six stories and one novella that make up the collection are set in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Prior to my reading of this book, I'd always imagined Ireland to be a green, picturesque, yet slightly melancholic island, full of quaint little pub-filled towns and villages, green fields, and cows. There was always the invariable priest and the overarching influence of the church, and its citizens seemed to be a predominantly elderly and respectably poor lot: a notion influenced by all the Irish short fiction (especially William Trevor's) I've read over the years. Barrett, however, flips that idea on its head. Yes, there are tiny pub-filled villages and green fields, but this is a much more gritty Ireland (or, more specifically, a small town near the west coast) consisting of the seriously down and out, people living on "estates" and where those pubs are less charming than they are indicative of the poverty in which these people live and the boredom of their lives. Barrett's Ireland is an ugly place, full of midges that feed on people's heads and contain all the usual and recognizable things that make up an increasingly globalized world. It's also a place in which the young, as the narrator states in the opening story "The Clancy Kid," have the run of the place (1)--these "young skins" with their tattoos and earlobe-stretched earrings, their drugs that they shoot, snort or smoke, their ADHD and autism. And instead of that pernicious and ever-present choke-hold of Roman Catholicism, both priest and church are conspicuously absent, replaced instead by a menacing and anarchic violence. Interesting, too, to note are the unusual couplings that also seem emblematic of the topsy-turvy state of things: Fannigan, a 50-year-old unmarried man who lives with his mother and attempts to rape a 14-year-old girl; Marlene, a single-mom who lives with her "consenting, pragmatic" (4) mother, the latter thinking nothing of her daughter bringing men home; Hector and Paudie, two unmarried brothers who live together (and happen to run a grow-op out of their farm); and Dympna, simultaneously adored by his "coven" (86) of sisters yet tainted by the "persistent low rumours that suggested he fucked [them]" (105).  And like the priests, fathers are also missing here. Nearly everyone's "da" has long been in the ground, or just not there.

But what captures and inspires me most about these stories is the language. Barrett has a unique and inimitable style that mixes the arcane with the vulgar, the formal with the crass, blended too with the many colloquialisms unique to Ireland. I turn to a page at random, and here is what I find. From the story "Bait", listen to this:

Music chugged from the open door of a parked car and there were tinnies and smokes as those to shift were determined and paired off. Shifting was a curiously bloodless, routinised ritual, involving lengthy arbitration by the friends of the prospective pairings, who, as in arranged marriages, did not so much as get to say hello until they were shoved into each other's arms and exhorted to take the dark walk into the maw of the woods. There, with that hello barely exchanged, each couple would find a sheltering bole to lean against or beneath, and commence their bodily negotiations. (20)

As the above illustrates, there's no pared-down minimalist prose here; rather Barrett is unafraid to do the opposite, to write in what he called in a recent Paris Review interview a "maximalistic" style. It's refreshingly unique and exciting.

In addition, Barrett seldom employs boring linking verbs like "was," "seem," or "got". Nearly every Barrett sentence cracks, pops, and sizzles--not to mention surprises--with an energy that I've only ever seen before in someone like Denis Johnson. Again, listen to this passage, and notice how every verb (and adjective too) is a vibrant and animated thing:

Fandango's was a hot box. Neon strobed and pulsed, dry ice fumed in the air. Libidinal bass juddered the windowless walls. I was sinking shots at the bar with Dessie Roberts when she crackled in my periphery. She'd already seen me and was swanning over. We exchanged bashful smiles, smiles that knew exactly what was coming. (4)

The stories that make up Young Skins are generally linear in structure with little back story, focusing on the here-and-now of these characters' lives and the situations they find themselves in. In my own stories I have a tendency for resolution, a need to tie all the knots, as it were (which is probably why I tend to write such lengthy stories); but Barrett demonstrates that that is not always necessary. "The Clancy Kid," for example, at first seems to meander aimlessly, going from the bar in which the narrator and his friend Tug drink and theorize about the missing Clancy kid, to tipping over Marlene's fiance's car, to crossing an unrepaired footbridge "guarded" by a trio of children. What is this story about? I began to wonder at some point. But it's in the sudden ending in which the narrator, once safely across the bridge, turns around and sees that "the children are gone" (18), that the story unexpectedly and poignantly (and somewhat ineffably) answers that question and what the Clancy kid represents, sadly foretelling too how little will change in the lives of these characters. Young Skins is a powerful and inspiring collection, one that will sit next to me at my desk as I continue to work on my own stories for some time to come. If you have a collection of stories that similarly blew you away from cover to cover, I'd love to hear of it.

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Reading Proust II

I thought I was going to set aside Proust for a little while. And I did. I got caught up on my magazines, read Edna O'Brien's lovely collection of stories Mrs. Reinhardt, and I had planned on rereading The Tin Drum, another big book; but just as I was about to plunge into Grass's novel, I felt Proust's magnetic pull. And so I started Volume II, the 700-plus pages that make up Within a Budding Grove.

The first half, entitled Madame Swann at Home, resumes the young narrator's fascination with the Swann family and, in particular, his obsession with Gilberte, Mme Swann's daughter. As we left off in Volume I, he still meets her every afternoon in the Champs-Elysee to play. Eventually he overcomes both her and her family's initial resistance, gets invited to their home, and becomes something of a regular fixture there, seeming at times to be more attracted to Mme Swann than to her daughter. Then (for the rest of Volume II at any rate) the narrator falls out irreparably with Gilberte: boy gets girl; boy loses girl.

The "at home" part of the title refers to Mme Swann's "at homes," a weekly Wednesday afternoon gathering of society women; it's also the day on which Gilberte hosts her own tea parties to which the narrator is among the invited guests. Here's a favourite moment describing this time in the narrator's life:

...I would arrive in the zone in which the scent of Mme Swann greeted my nostrils. I could already visualize the majesty of the chocolate cake, encircled by plates heaped with biscuits, and by tiny napkins of patterned grey damask, as required by convention but peculiar to the Swanns.... And [Gilberte] would usher us into the dining-room, as sombre as the interior of an Asiatic temple painted by Rembrandt, in which an architectural cake, as urbane and familiar as it was imposing seemed to be enthroned there on the off-chance as on any other day, in case the fancy seized Gilberte to discrown it of its chocolate battlements and to hew down the steep brown slopes of its ramparts, baked in the oven like the bastions of the palace of Darius. (107)

In the second half of the book, Place Names / The Place, the narrator--older now, early twenties I'm guessing--and his grandmother travel to the coastal town of Balbec where they spend the summer in the Grand Hotel. It's here that he meets the aristocratic Robert de Saint-Loup. After some initial awkwardness, the two men become the best of friends, but when Saint-Loup returns to the barracks, from which he has been on leave, the narrator makes the acquaintance of what he often refers to as that "little band" of girls and, in particular, Albertine, another girl he falls in love with.

Not surprisingly, class is an important theme throughout the novel and in Volume II in particular. Friendship often seems like a disingenuous thing in the society to which we are privy, and we frequently see characters clamoring to get an introduction to so-and-so, not out of any genuine interest but as a means of elevating themselves socially. Snobbery is prevalent. In spite of having brought their servant Francoise, the narrator and his grandmother are not on the same social scale as some of the hotel's other guests and are initially isolated until the grandmother's friend, Mme de Villeparisis, arrives. Being seen with such a distinguished guest (Villeparisis turns out to be a marquise of the Guermantes family) does much to alleviate the narrator's own sense of isolation by opening up social possibilities. But in a world apparently full of masqueraders, not not everyone is convinced the marquise is who she says she is. In one particularly funny scene, the judge's wife, "who scented irregularities everywhere" (383), suspects Mme Villeparisis might not be as much of a marquise as "an adventuress" (383).   She says:

"I always begin by believing the worst. I will never admit that a woman is properly married until she has shown me her birth certificate and marriage lines. But never fear--just wait till I've finished my little investigation." (383)

Later, when the Princesse de Luxembourg arrives to pay a social call on Mme Villeparisis, the judge's wife reports to her friends, "I've discovered something" (383):

"Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint on her face and a carriage which reeked of harlot a mile away ... came here today to call on the so-called Marquise! ... I picked up her card. She trades under the name of the 'Princesse de Luxembourg'! Wasn't I right to have my doubts about her?" (384)

Although the judge's wife is hugely erroneous in her conclusion, the idea that things are never quite what they seem is another important facet of the book. The narrator's aristocratic friend St-Loup, for instance, who at first appears to be utterly snobbish, not only turns out to be extraordinarily warm and gentle (at least to the narrator) but also claims to be a Republican. In contrast, Francoise, who one would expect to be a Republican, turns out to be a Royalist. The narrator's dubious friend Bloch, who at one point voices antisemitic epithets turns out to be of Jewish background himself. The artist Elstir turns out to be the much-maligned M. Biche of the Verderin set from Volume I; and the artist's portrait of the actress he calls Miss Sacripant turns out in fact to be a portrait of the young Mme Swann, Odette de Crecy. Albertine, too, who the narrator supposes to a cyclist's mistress turns out to be a penniless orphan.

The world of appearances--the world of smoke and mirrors--extends also to the Swanns: Mme Swann gives off the air of someone of much higher class and education than she really is, while M. Swann takes something of an opposite approach in his attempt to hide the true extent of his affluent social connections (mostly seen in Volume I). And of course both put on the mask of faithfulness to the other.

And then there's that strange matter of the names Proust has given all the girls the narrator is attracted to, feminine derivatives of otherwise masculine names: Gilberte, Albertine, Andree. Given that we know that the autobiographical Proust was gay, is another mask, another illusion, at work here too? (Maybe we'll find out in Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah.) 

Even the narrator's beloved Bergotte, the writer who's had a profound influence on the narrator and who he assumes would be of similarly grand and imposing stature in real life, turns out to be a "youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a goatee beard. I was cruelly disappointed" (165).

Again and again we encounter the narrator's disappointment in all he has high expectations of, a disappointment that is often later turned on its head by someone or something else. His initial disappointment, for example, after he has at last seen the famous singer Berma perform onstage is completely reversed when he reads a review in the newspaper in which he concludes (after one of the longest sentences I've so far encountered in Proust): "What a great artist!" (72). In another example, Elstir opens the narrator's eyes regarding the "Persian church" at Balbec in which the narrator also felt deep disappointment about, teaching him to see the "celestial vision ... inscribed there in stone" (575). These ever-changing visions, coupled with the inability to really know, understand, grasp, or see something as it really is is central to the whole book and the narrator's perpetual "search for lost time." When the narrator is away from Gilberte, for instance, he finds he can't remember what she looks like (although all the other ordinary cast of characters in his life readily appear in his mind's eye). Albertine's birthmark, too, sometimes appears to be in one place, then another when he conjures her up in his imagination. And of Albertine's character, he says "[she] struck me as somewhat shy instead of implacable; she seemed to me more proper than ill-bred.... But this was merely a second impression and there were doubtless others through which I would successively pass" (619)--impressions as ever-changing as the view of the sea outside the narrator's belvedere window in the Grand Hotel.

We often hear novels and even short stories described as opening up whole worlds; but Search, I've discovered, is a totally different kind of beast. Instead of a world, Proust has created an entire universe, one that is uniquely situated between old and modern worlds, between the 19th and 20th centuries, an era where horse-driven carriages and oil-lit lamps meet motor-cars, aeroplanes, and telephones.  Like Volume I, Within a Budding Grove is often filled with rapturous prose and Proust's hallmark long and winding sentences. But I have to admit that his endless and sometimes obfuscating philosophizing on just about everything drew me out of the story at times. But I've discovered that to read Proust--I mean really read Proust--and to deftly crest those enormous waves of philosophizing one needs time; not just an hour here, an hour there, but the dedication of long stretches of solid, back-to-back hours on a daily basis in order for Proust to dangle his hypnotist's pocket-watch and for one to fall, headlong and spellbound, into this vast and complicated landscape.

 

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Review of Interpreters in the Spring 2015 issue of The Fiddlehead

Rebecca Geleyn's review of my collection of stories Interpreters is now out in the Spring 2015 issue (no. 263) of The Fiddlehead. I was a bit nervous when I picked it up in the bookstore (it's the first review of the book I'd come across) and the sense of foreboding I had as I hurriedly thumbed through the pages to find it reminded of those times in high school when you discover people have been talking about you behind your back, a feeling that was emphasized by the equally strange sight of my own words being quoted back at me. I was afraid I was going to find something horribly soul crushing, but, mercifully, it's a generally positive review, at times opening up interpretations (pun intended!) that I hadn't entirely thought of myself. "This collection of stories," Geleyn writes, "shows the most poignancy when zeroing in on nuggets of problematic or untranslatable language. Interpreters moves towards the hermeneutic gap between words of two different languages, incommunicable because of their intrinsic link to lived experience and culture." Hermeneutic! Now that's a word I haven't used since my grad school days.

She does say, however, that at times "some stories ... resort too quickly to summarization, taking readers out of the immediate action," but that overall the book is "a promising first collection." She also adds that "Schafrick's stories are strikingly contemporary, dealing with online dating culture, individuals trying to keep up with an increasingly globalized world, acquaintances that travel and reappear in unexpected places, and challenging job markets."  Phew! Not bad. Thank you! Pick it up at a bookstore near you.

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