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Award-winning writer Kevin Barry's first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.
October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.
One
The First Encounter
On Wyoming Street in the evening a patent Irish stumbled by, some crazy old meathead in a motley of rags and filthy buckskin, wild tufts of hair sticking out the ears, the eyes burning now like hot stars, now clamped shut in a kind of ecstasy, and he lurched and tottered on broken boots like a nightmare overgrown child, like some massive obliterated eejit child, and he sang out his wares in a sweet clear lilting—
Pot-ay-toes?
Hot po-tay-toes?
Hot pot-ah-toes a pe-nny?
* * *
By Park and Main the darkness had fallen. He looked in at the Board of Trade for a consultation. He took a glass of whiskey and a beer chaser. He slapped the one and sipped the other. The bad nerves fell away on a quick grade to calmness and resolve. He gathered himself beautifully. He took out a pad and a length of pencil. He looked to the long mirror above the bar and spoke without turning to Patrick Holohan, of Eyeries, County Cork, a miner of the Whistler pit—Object matrimony, he said.
Holohan in turn considered the mirror warily— Go again, Tom?
It's what we say early on. It's cards on the fucken table time. Show that you're not playing games with the girl. What's it her name is anyhow?
Holohan with native shyness slid a letter along the bartop. The wet papery flutters of his breath meant a lunger in the long run. Tom Rourke unfolded the letter and briefly read— you'd need a heart of stone in this line— and he began fluently at once to write.
This'll only be a rough go at it, he said. See if we can strike some manner of tone. Reassure the girl.
Moments passed by in the calm of composition. Looking up, briefly, in search of a word, he saw Pat Holohan in the mirror observing the work with guilt. There was terror in the man's eyes that he might have a measure of happiness due.
Dear Miss Stapleton—Rourke spoke it now as he read over the words—or Margaret, if I may be so bold. It is my enormous good fortune to have the opportunity today to write to you, and if the marks on the page are not my own, you will know that the words are, and that they are full in earnest.
Oh, that's lovely, Tom, Holohan said, his face unclenching. More of it, boy.
I write to you in the hope, Margaret, as desperate as it may be, that you will consider a path west from your present situation in Boston and come join me here in the most prosperous town to be found upon the high plateau.
Upon the fucken what?
Mountain, Pat.
He finished the beer ...
Excerpted from The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. Copyright © 2024 by Kevin Barry. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
1. What aspects of Tom's personality make him suspect among the authorities of Butte? How might his more artistic and mystical interests have been received if he was living in a different time period?
2. Early in the novel, Tom thinks, "The prospect of death was a glamorous comfort but it did not hold for long" (17). How is this attitude a harbinger of Tom's fate in pursuit of romantic love?
3. When Tom falls for Polly, is he struck primarily by her as a person or by the idea of being in love and married? What does Tom promise to offer Polly as an alternative to her life as the wife of Anthony Harrington?
4. Discuss the drifter characters that Tom and Polly meet on the road. How does someone like the Reverend, who warns him about the dangers of "tiny creatures in our guts ... [who] want us concentrated in the body and not in the Spirit," contribute to their disconnect from the real world (89)?
5. The townspeople describe Tom as having "a kind of witchery about him" (109). What events lead them to this conclusion? What does it mean during this time for a man to be labeled with that word?
6. Discuss Anthony's self-flagellation and rant about Tom—do you believe his rage is about losing Polly, or is it about the offense to his own masculine pride?
7. What aspects of Irish culture have become embedded in Butte? Consider the idea that "soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm" (116). How does Tom embody this sentiment and outlook?
8. Describe the couple's connection to their horse. Why does selling her seem like such a betrayal? How does Tom anthropomorphize the horse in his mind and behaviors?
9. How do you think the couple would have fared if Polly hadn't been attacked by the Jacks? Would they have been able to settle down anywhere, or were they fated to a life on the run? What does their life suggest about the feasibility of the dream of the American West prominent during this time period?
10. After the attack, the Swedish doctor says that Tom soaks up dope "like a sponge" (169). Although he'd been using drugs already, do you think his tolerance increased due to the circumstances, with both his physical and emotional pain requiring more numbing? What path might Tom have gone down if he lived in modern times?
11. How does Tom's relationship to spirituality change after he loses Polly? Consider what he expects from God when "he made himself stronger by force of belief. He spoke to God fiercely ... He slept like the dead after that. There was no more dreaming" (171).
12. How does the tone of the narrative shift once Polly's perspective takes over? Does she suffer in the same way as Tom, knowing how he was injured, and eventually dies, trying to protect her?
13. A man Tom meets on the road says, "You ain't the sort has to go lookin for trouble, are you, son? ... Just kinda finds you, don't it?" (189). Does Tom welcome this aspect of his life circumstances? Does he try to avoid trouble? In the end, do you think Tom believed it was worth it to run away with Polly?
14. Polly reflects, "Anyhow the past it shifts around all the time. The past is not fixed and it is not certain and this much she has learned if nothin else. The past it changes all the while every minute you're still breathing and how in fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all" (242). How is the past changing for Polly? Do you think Tom will remain fixed in her memory, or has he already acquired a kind of mythology about him? What are the relief and the pain of having all of time—past, present, future—be unpredictable and fluid?
Suggested Reading:
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
The Morningside by Téa Obreht
Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
Stoner by John Williams
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Doubleday. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
In Butte, Montana, a mining town filled with largely Irish immigrants, Tom Rourke survives by working as a photographer's assistant and writing love letters for illiterate men seeking wives back East. It is October 1891, and Tom senses a premonition in the cold night air: "[H]e felt the strangest thing, a thought almost beyond words, that the winter would have purpose for him yet."
Fate propels Tom: he sees it etched in the night air, in the window of his room, and in the approaching winter. As a central theme, fate permeates the novel, driving the plot and setting the characters on their path. Author Kevin Barry consistently revisits this idea, articulating it mainly through Tom, who is depressive, passionate, and cultured, but also through Polly, his co-protagonist and love interest.
The wheels of destiny begin turning when Tom, drunk and high on opium, has an encounter with a palomino horse a few hours after hearing the whistle of a train cutting through the night—the same train from which Polly had presumably descended to marry Anthony Harrington, a fervently religious man and captain of the local mining company. Like Tom, Polly feels fate looming over her: when she first sees him at the photography studio where she is taking her newlywed portrait, she feels a heavy weight, like "a cloud passing over." After a few encounters, Tom and Polly flee town with the stolen palomino and $600, leaving behind a fire and a scorned husband.
The first half of the novel chronicles the lovers' flight through the mountains of Montana as winter progresses. They encounter a collection of memorable, broken, and lonely personalities that encapsulate the America of the time, but could just as easily belong to the contemporary United States. The author also includes brief glimpses into the thoughts of other characters. There is a particularly beautiful and well-crafted chapter in which the actions are not directly seen but described through the perspectives of different townspeople. Barry sketches his characters with sentences as sharp and stinging as the cold that freezes the lovers, and as winding as the rivers they cross, alternating rawness with humorous jabs and wordplay like, "He said he would be a kind and providential husband to her. She said she'd been to Providence one time." Providence is, incidentally, the name the lovers give to the cabin where they take refuge for a few weeks, and where they will be discovered by their pursuers.
Midway through the novel, the author shifts focus from the lovers to introduce these "villains." Back in Butte, Anthony has hired three hitmen to find Tom and Polly. From this point on, the plot accelerates, perhaps too much in the later chapters. There are also some "deus ex machina" moments, scenes that seem solely designed to advance the plot.
The Heart in Winter reads like an oral account told by a campfire, in street whispers, or between sips in a bar, almost as an extension of the speculation that different characters engage in about the lovers' fate towards the novel's end. The language flows with a lyrical, intimate tone, where the narrator directly addresses the reader: "[A]nd sometimes their laughter can be heard in the air of that place still. Just listen in."
Barry arranges these sentences in very short paragraphs and sections that initially make immersion in the story difficult but ultimately render it addictive. Barry is a master of brevity: he can describe a character in three lines and summarize the novel's thesis in a few sentences spoken by a secondary character: "Remember always that we're only marking time until sweet death comes, and it's surely coming for us all (...) So if there's someone out there who can help you to ease the pain for your life... you gotta go an' do what it is you gotta do."
Reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández
Francine Prose, author of A Changed Man
Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Mary Costello, author of Academy Street
The Californian Gold Rush, the American Civil War, and the lure of land expansion filled the 19th-century American West with men like Tom Rourke, the protagonist of Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter. These men came to work as miners, farmers, or ranchers—but they often lacked companions to help with farm work, ensure the continuity of their families, or, perhaps most importantly, alleviate their loneliness. According to the US census, Montana in 1890 (the state and decade in which the novel is set) had a population of 85,981 males and 46,178 females. Tom helps illiterate men write letters to women back East with the objective of finding a bride. With this detail, Barry gives us a glimpse into what is often referred to as the mail-order bride system, a phenomenon that shaped the social landscape of the American frontier. (Despite this being the common term used, these particular marriage arrangements did not generally involve an exchange of money.)
Francesca Beauman, who wrote about this subject in her book Matrinomy, Inc., explains, "Newspapers became an essential way that farmers, anyone who was geographically isolated, were going to find a spouse — both for men and women." Initially, people placed personal advertisements in widely circulated newspapers (see some examples here), taking advantage of low mailing costs. In these advertisements, men and women offered brief personal descriptions and expressed their desire to marry, often including their addresses. This practice had already made an appearance in Great Britain in the previous century. In 1695, a British publication featured an advertisement from a gentleman with "a very good estate" who sought "some good young gentlewoman that has a fortune of £300 or thereabouts." What is believed to be the first personal ad published in America appeared in the Boston Evening Post in 1759. However, it was in 19th-century America that the mail-order bride system became a widespread phenomenon, peaking between the 1880s and the 1910s.
This trend led to the creation of specialized publications like Matrimonial News and The Matrimonial Bazar, which focused almost exclusively on connecting men and women. The editor of the latter stated in 1876: "Our aim is high: To increase the number of home firesides, promote the happiness of other people, in short to do what we can toward mitigating woe and loneliness in any sphere or grade of life." Through these newspapers, men and women began corresponding, and many of these exchanges culminated in marriage. Typically, the woman would travel thousands of miles west to meet her prospective husband, and they would marry almost immediately upon her arrival.
Just as men outnumbered women in the western territories, there was a scarcity of men back East, especially after three million left to fight in the Civil War. And just as men sought help in their labors, women sought economic support and social security in an era in which their societal roles were largely confined to domestic duties. For many women, going west meant economic survival and new opportunities. Widows, divorcees, and single women saw the West as a place for independence and reinvention. Historians offer multiple reasons why women would take the risk to travel west to marry men they did not know: the frontier offered them opportunities for owning land, retaining ownership of their properties, control over their children, liberal divorce laws, and even suffrage. According to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, "Some western states made a deliberate effort to encourage the migration of women by promising them liberal women's legislation."
The article further explains, "Whereas being a mail-order bride for an American woman was usually an act of autonomy, being a picture bride was often a decision made by family members and external circumstances." Picture brides were women living overseas who were introduced to men in the United States by sending their photographs in the mail. In this era, they usually came from Japan (where the term originates), Greece, Italy, Korea, or Armenia. Many married to escape colonization or genocide, to secure the right to work in America and send money back home, or, as the Smithsonian article states, as a "geographical extension" of the arranged marriage tradition prevalent in their home countries. But mail-order brides were "a historical oddity" in that "[t]hey simultaneously break from traditions of arranged marriages and also fail to resemble modern matrimonial customs."
There are no concrete statistics on the total number of marriages arranged through the mail-order system, but it was a significant aspect of frontier life, and points to the unique challenges of those seeking companionship and stability in the American West.
Advertisements for marriage in the San Francisco Call, 1909, courtesy of the Library of Congress
Filed under People, Eras & Events
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