Homesickness

One of the challenges for a writer of short stories is to resist the tidiness that their compact form seems to demand, and evoke the full messiness of life while still telling a tale. Messy is something that Barrett is especially good at. His stories, set mostly in County Mayo, a place of towns and farms where everybody, for better or worse, knows each other, are stories to be sure, with.a twist here and an epiphany there, but what makes them so wonderful is everything in between: the banter, the indirection, the texture of daily life, the weary knowingness of people so familiar to each other that they might have stopped paying attention to who they really are.