Cheeky humor enlivens ‘Wild Houses,’ a tale of desperate Irish gangsters

Irish writer Colin Barrett has won widespread, fervent acclaim for two short-story collections. He brings that form’s compression and tensile sentences to his debut novel, “Wild Houses,” which chronicles a weekend from hell in the small city of Ballina, County Mayo, as a gang of drug smugglers implodes and a kidnapping goes horribly awry. Here, Barrett soars into the tier of of Kevin Barry and Sally Rooney, both influences, but his grim yet tender vision of humanity distinguishes his tale.

As Ballina kicks off its annual Salmon Festival, Ferdia brothers Gabe and Sketch show up at their cousin Dev’s residence, bearing a hostage. They’ve abducted Doll English, the younger brother of petty criminal Cillian English, from a local bacchanal, leaving Doll’s hungover girlfriend Nicky to piece together the plot.

Cillian owes money to the Ferdias and their overlord; it’s time to pay. Doll’s the ransom. Dev’s mother has recently died and his gambler father is mentally infirm; he hunkers down at home in the countryside, a sweet-tempered if passive middle-man in his cousins’ affairs and, now, Doll’s inadvertent captor.

Dev prefers isolation, tramping about the fields, which Barrett renders in an echo of the Old Testament: “There was no dark like country dark, the blackness beyond the house so total that looking out across the back fields he could not tell where the earth ended and the sky began. All was void.”

A hostess at a restaurant, Nicky wants out: She’s focused on her future and the possibility of university in Dublin. Doll’s a bad habit . . . or does she really love him? With “nerves of steel,” she joins Cillian in his thuggish spree to get his brother back; there are enough broken bones, bloody wounds and bruised organs to fill a medical textbook.

Barrett walks a fine line between the rage and despair that drive grifters and misfits. He vividly depicts the crucible of teenage boys, physical changes that provoke erratic behavior, “a string of strange, uncomely manifestations — medieval sores and cracks erupting on their cheeks, rashy outbursts of hair, pains in their joints and a hoarse, hoopy crackling in their voices, as if adolescence was a permanent head cold.”

“Wild Houses” is akin to a Yo-Yo Ma concert at Carnegie Hall: Barrett’s pitch is perfect, the acoustics divine. He metes out his dialogue in syncopated bits, reminiscent of Barry but less slapstick. While a cheeky humor thrums throughout the novel, Barrett isn’t particularly interested in redemption or even plain decency.

“The Ferdias had the unreliability, but also the dangerous decisiveness, of creatures who did not understand their nature and did not care to understand it,” he notes. “You could never tell what lines they would elect to cross, what courses of action they would follow through to the bitter end, because they did not know either.” It’s Hobbes, transported to Ireland’s craggy west.

Dev and Nicky, the novel’s moral pillars, can’t halt tragedy’s momentum; they can only deflect it. The author skillfully guides us to a resolution both surprising and inevitable: No one emerges from this dark business unscathed, but some thrive while others slide. “Wild Houses” unfurls like a controlled detonation, rich with wonder and catharsis.

Hamilton Cain, who reviews a range of venues, including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Wild Houses

By: Colin Barrett.

Publisher: Grove, 272 pages, $27.