“Heart, Be at Peace” springs into motion with a photo that Seanie took of Bobby emerging from an Amsterdam brothel; Bobby hasn’t been unfaithful, yet Réaltín shares the image across Nenagh. The cartel closes in, undermining Bobby’s gains. Betrayals beget betrayals as the author leads us through a maze of entwined lives.
Ryan’s sentences gleam, peeling the calloused skin of machismo to expose the vulnerabilities of his men, cutting against our expectations. Seanie’s a louse — perhaps worse — until he speaks for himself in a slang that smacks of stout and salt breezes: “It’s like I’m split in two, light and dark. Most of the time the two sides can mingle so I’m just kind of stable, half normal,” he says. “I can act the bollix, slag away, take a slagging … I can give a hand out at the hurling with the coaching here and there, and Dylan doesn’t even get embarrassed.” His goodness, buried deep within, isn’t less real simply because it’s buried.
Ryan’s women also grapple with what it means to be good. Lily, an elderly recluse, prefers pagan rituals to Catholic pieties: “I was a witch by training and a whore by inclination.” Her granddaughter, Millicent, falls for Nenagh’s bad boy, the sadistic Augie Penrose. Mags, a lesbian engineer, recalls her deceased father, “a memory … delivered in a parcel of morning air, so vivid and stark that every intervening moment sloughed away and I was dragged suddenly and violently by the elastic tether that joined me to my 6-year-old self, so that I could feel his hand in mine.”
Does the sheer number of characters dilute this short novel’s impact? Ryan winks to his own technique in a chapter narrated by an inmate who dreams of becoming a writer: “I composed a series of monologues. I gave each speaker a unique voice. … And when I had the language leashed, the characters were suddenly beyond my control. They were crazy! The things they said and did. The wild joy I felt. The rightness of it all.” “Heart, Be at Peace” moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, sifting relationships built on sand, pummeled by tides of human folly.
HEART, BE AT PEACE | By Donal Ryan | Viking | 196 pp. | $28
