Kevin Barry will blow you away with Montana-set ‘The Heart in Winter’

Steal money, torch a hotel and ride off into the sunset with another man’s wife. The things we do for love.

The wayward hero of the brilliant Irish writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in the United States is Thomas Rourke, who at 29 is “half a genius” and “a great scholar of debt.” While vowing to abstain from drugs, drink and prostitutes, Rourke proceeds in the opening scene to indulge all three in a terrific bender. Simply reading it may give you a hangover. By morning, Rourke looks like “he was operated by an inept puppeteer.”

Or is it some other unseen hand that guides Rourke? Fate? Love? An Irish temperament that renders him “deathlorn”?

In 1891, having left “haunted days” and “bad nights” back in Ireland, Rourke finds himself in Butte, “the black heart of Montana,” a bustling town full of migrants, railroads, copper mines and pollution. As a side gig, the wannabe writer pens love notes on behalf of lonely men seeking mates in the expanding American West.

One such mail-order bride, Polly Gillespie, appears at the photo studio where Rourke works as an assistant. She is newly wed to a wealthy, religious mine boss. The spark between the two “hoodlums of love” ignites a scheme to run off together on a single horse, bound for San Francisco.

Their journey is a cold-weather picaresque, replete with psychedelic mushrooms and a goodhearted but homicidal backwoods reverend. Descriptions are lyrical: “They rode the blue starlit realm of the wintertime. Against them in night silvers the Pontneuf river ran.” Warmth and contentment briefly arrive at an abandoned cabin in the woods where the new couple finds their version of marital bliss.

Here, as in his previous novels and stories, Barry’s inventive prose is a sentence-by-sentence pleasure, like an alpine hike with many turns, or a row of shot glasses brimming with Irish whiskey on a burnished bar. His ear for how certain types of people converse is uncanny.

Tom and Polly, while perhaps not as instantly memorable as the Beckettian middle-aged gangsters Maurice and Charlie in Barry’s “Night Boat to Tangier,” are by turns jolly, brooding, idealistic and fatalistic.

When bounty hunters injure Tom and hogtie Polly, we learn more about her tough-cookie past. She figures she’s in “one of those rank evil type nightmare situations, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t been through a share of them before.”

After they are separated by violence, Tom sets out again, determined to rescue his damsel in distress. And, “if death came in the way of seeing her again in this life, that was just how it was meant to be.”

More a chamber western than a John Ford epic, “The Heart in Winter” brims with terrific (and wonderfully named) minor characters. It is a heartbreaker of a romance.

Claude Peck is a former columnist and editor at the Star Tribune.

The Heart in Winter

By: Kevin Barry.

Publisher: Doubleday, 256 pages, $28.

Event: In conversation with Julie Schumacher, 7 p.m. July 11, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Av., Mpls. Free, but reservations recommended.