What Joyce and his countrymen did do was to remake English, molding the language of the ruling élite into something beguilingly subversive, an unstable compound of familiar and foreign. If you want to understand Irish literature’s extraordinary richness, Foster suggested, the special magic of everyday Irish speech is a good place to start.
Few contemporary writers have done more with the natural resource of Irish English, or with the buried tensions at the heart of Irish identity, than Sebastian Barry, who made his name as a playwright before emerging as one of Europe’s leading novelists. To open one of Barry’s books is to be hit by a great gale of talk. In “Days Without End” (2017), the talker is Thomas McNulty, who has fled the Great Famine of the eighteen-forties and come to live in the United States. For want of other work, McNulty joins the Army, where many of his compatriots have also wound up. “You know a Irishman because he has it writ all over him,” he says in his vividly skewed English, which he has acquired only since arriving in America. “He speaks some other way and he is not a great man for hair cutting generally and there’s something about a Irish when he is drinking that just ain’t like any other human being. Don’t tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity.” If you’re Irish, of course, so-called civilized humanity may be more a term of abuse than of approbation.
“What am I supposed to tell this lady?” she asked him. “I can’t keep doing this. Every minute it’s something.”
Joe reached for her hand. “It’ll get better. Stick with me,” he said, but now they could hear the woman tossing some of her belongings onto the floor.
“The king needs his ransom!” she shouted.
“I’m sorry, but it’s time to go,” Debbie told her.
“You thieves. You devils,” the woman said.
“Please,” Debbie said. “This is our business. We’re just trying to get through lunch.”
Tell Her Everything is a layered recital of intricately woven hauntings, decisions, and confessions. It is a story of a man who loves his daughter and wants to provide her with the upbringing he never had; it is a story of a man who is more than complicit in a horrible system of punishment; and it is also a story of how the desire to be a good provider can push one to unspeakable limits—how the shame of transgressing those limits can destroy the very relationships you sacrificed for, in addition to one’s sense of self.
This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know.