That Tough Move From Short Stories To Novels

Born in Canada in 1982, Colin Barrett was raised near Ballina, County Mayo, and though he left as a teenager, studying creative writing at University College Dublin, Mayo has provided the setting for almost all his writing to date. His debut short story collection, Young Skins, came out in 2013, winning the Guardian first book award and yielding a film adaptation, Calm With Horses, starring Cosmo Jarvis and Barry Keoghan. He followed it with the 2022 collection Homesickness and last year’s Booker-longlisted novel Wild Houses, which revolves around a poorly-planned kidnapping in Ballina. Winner of the Nero debut fiction award, it is now out in paperback. Barrett lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.

What sparked Wild Houses?
The first scene I wrote was the opening one. Dev Hendrick wakes up in the middle of night and there’s a car outside. Two men bring a teenage boy to the door. The men turn out to be Dev’s criminal cousins and Doll, the boy, is a bargaining chip in a haphazard blackmailing scheme. What attracted me was writing from the perspective of Dev, who is on the periphery. I was very taken with that situation, where a passive and withdrawn character is pushed right up against this dramatic and potentially traumatic event.

You’d only written short stories previously. Did you know it was a novel from the outset?
It certainly didn’t feel like just a short story, because too much was implied that would have to be explored. And I knew I needed other pieces to it. I needed a counterweight to Dev’s story, and that’s where the other main character, Nicky, came in. She’s in the heart of the community; she bounces around between social groups, she’s very socially capable. She would allow us to step out of the claustrophobic world of Dev’s house.

You write a lot about petty criminals and other marginal characters in small-town Mayo. What draws you to that milieu?
I want to write about characters who are outside whatever the ordered society is, and in a small-town community there’s a lot of margin to be part of. It’s not even overt criminals, but adolescents, unemployed people. Dev has a suite of mental health problems, so he’s on the outside as well.

You must have been a very observant kid, because you haven’t lived in Mayo for many years and yet your writing about it is so vivid.
I was not observant at all. I’m still not now. My wife is astonished that I’m able to write. When she reads my work, she’s like, “You pay such attention to things, but you don’t in real life.”

Now that you’ve written a novel, do you have an appetite to write more?
Yeah. I found it difficult to write but it was very rewarding in the end. And, immediately, another idea that definitely is a novel and not a short story suggested itself.

Can you tell me anything about it? Where is it set?
Mayo! I don’t think I’ll live long enough to ever get out of Mayo. Maybe, one day, I’ll open a page and realise there’s no more juice to be squeezed out of Mayo, but it’s still juicy at the moment.

What’s your connection to Colm Tóibín?
He was my mentor, through an arts programme by Rolex. We spent two or three years working together. He’s a lovely guy. But Colm did say, about the book: “You have enough editors already, you don’t need another one.” He was writing The Magician at that time, about Thomas Mann, and he was in the middle of redrafts. When we’d meet up, he go, “I’m stuck in this chapter, what do you think I should do?” He treated me as a peer. We had a very easy rapport.

Did he give you any useful advice?
Lots. The best one was: if you hand in a book, whoever tells you it has the most wrong with it, they’re probably right.

Who, of Irish fiction writers working at the moment, captures the country in a way that most resonates with you?
I don’t know who would have a definitive take on it, but I do love the versions of Ireland that Nicole Flattery writes. There’s a first novel coming out by John Patrick McHugh, Fun and Games, set in an island in the west of Ireland. It’s about a teenage boy, so it has all the classic tropes, but it’s an extremely funny novel with brilliant dialogue. And then Wendy Erskine from Belfast – her first novel, The Benefactors, is fantastic. It’s really stuck with me since I finished it. But we could keep going. Actually, Colm Tóibín told me, read Dermot Healy’s A Goat’s Song and all of John McGahern. They were writing about an Ireland that’s before my time, but not that much before, and you can see the links.

Are there any underappreciated books or authors that you’re always trying to press on people?
The American writer Tom Drury who wrote The End of Vandalism. His books are hard to pitch to people, because they’re set in small-town Ohio and quite stripped back, quite Carver-esque, and so it’s hard to articulate why they’re so good. But just watching these characters evolve slowly over the decades is very moving to see.

What books did you love as a kid?
I just read lots of comic books and watched lots of cartoons, which does not make me unique, but both were useful in giving me an appreciation of plot and storytelling. Even when I was playing with my toys, there would always be a story. I wasn’t just crashing trucks together, I’d get all my little men and do my own rip-off version of Star Wars. I got into books when I was a teenager, but then I was trying to read James Joyce and William Burroughs. So, straight away, I started on the heavy stuff.

Where and when do you write?
Generally here [at the dining-room table], and whenever I can, when the kids are out of the house. I can have some music on in the background or whatever, that’s fine. Having a couple of kids helps you realise that you can write where you like, as long as they’re not jumping on your head.

We’re meeting the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. How are you coping with all the turmoil in the world?
Just do the work. As a writer, there’s only so much you can do. When George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo came out, just after Trump’s first inauguration, I read a review that was like, “This is a good book but I don’t know if it’s what we need right now, because it’s celebratory about a president.” And as a writer, you’re just like, what can you do? He was probably writing that book for God knows how long. Where’s your hot take on the presidency, George? So you just have to write about what you’re going to write about and trust that it’ll contain that stuff anyway.