Rebecca BarryReseñas

“But it was daytime. The sun was out and the rules were different. He dropped his eyes and they passed each other without speaking, the way people who drink at the same place often do once they step out of the bar and into the world.”

“Across the street she could see the mourners staggering out of the lodge, two or three at a time, some singing, one woman weeping. 'Say what you will about drunks,' she said out loud to the dark room around her, 'but no one will love you like they can.'”

I like linked stories and I like drinking, so this collection, centered around Lucy's Tavern, in a small town, in upstate New York, turned out to be a perfect fit for me. The same broken and lovelorn characters, weave in an out of these stories, buying rounds, mooching drinks, and finding someone to go home with, after “last call”. My friends know, I love my craft beer and an occasional cocktail, but drinking on this level, with this kind of reckless abandon, has no appeal for me, but I sure like reading about it. Another round, bartender!

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting out of this, but whatever it was, I didn't get it.

These short stories center around small town inhabitants and their local bar. Ironically, the only story that I actually enjoyed was the only one that didn't have anything to do with drinking, or the bar.

I'd say skip this one if you happen to pick it up. It's a short read, which is probably the only reason I decided to finish it.

Linked short stories aren't usually my thing but these are very fine. I admire Barry's writing and her compassion for her characters. Lots of heartache here.

It reminded me of Louise Erdrich's very fine Love Medcine. Not a wasted word and emotionally very powerful.

Bourbon, beer and more: What a treat this new book by Rebecca Barry is! Short as it may be it packs a wallop on two levels...the host of characters replete with humorous dialogue and their inter-connected emotional states. Drink is central but it's a foil for everything else.

Set in upstate New York, the people who wander in and out of "Later, at the Bar" all have some major quirks. It's like reading an entire year's worth of episodes of "All My Children". Barry's narrative sails along unencumbered as bourbon is poured, beer is guzzled, cigarettes are lit up and tattoos are shown. Oh yes, there are plenty of tattoos! Marriages come and go on short notice, men leave women for other women and other men....well the list goes on. But the author makes each character a loveable and largely complex one. The final scene, where friends of Harlin gather, (as told through the eyes of Grace) is the culmination of a book that dares to embrace the underside of life and make it appear as normal as doings in your own hometown. In the end, people take care of each other. That says it all.

Rebecca Barry has given us a classic. It is funny and warm and bound to draw you in and make you stay for a glass or two. I highly recommend "Later, at the Bar" for its wit, charm and all of its endearing qualities.

I’ve been reading on this book for seven or eight months. It’s a collection of short stories that all center on life in a bar, with the same cast of characters. Very well written. I’d bet money the author went through a creative writing program somewhere and there’s nothing wrong with that, but why is it so obvious to readers?

I bought this on a complete whim. I hadn't heard of it. I almost never buy books I haven't already heard of. But the title jumped out at me. And it was adorably small (5.5 x 7.5). And I opened it to a random page and liked what I saw.

Turns out it has gotten some very good reviews.

Basically, it's 10 chapters about barflies in a small blue collar town in upstate New York. Each one stands on its own. And basically all character studies. Nothing happens. There are no lessons learned. They just muddle through their lives. But it's a really nice read. Real. And not in a depressing way.

I think part of whether this appeals to people is based on their own expectations and experiences of bar culture. This was very true to my own life. It's not, however, a major metro cosmopolitan sort of book. Not that sort of bar.

Some favorite excerpts:

"It was evening and the bar was beginning to take on the cozy, womblike feel it always got after happy hour, when people had just enough to drink to like themselves and forgive each other."

(Grace is crying)

"Lanford took a cocktail napkin out of his pocket and checked it for phone numbers. Seeing none, he handed it to Grace, who took it."

"She looked at the people around her: Earl in his one fine suit checking out Ada Wilder's ass; Ada standing there with her hand on her hip, letting him. Cyrus trying to look over his neck brace and down Janet Wilder's dress, Anne-Marie saying something to Martin, and Martin looking past her as if he'd already heard it a thousand times."

Usually I would quote a blurb about the book taken from it’s cover or jacket. However, inside there’s a description about the book by Hannah Tinti, author of Animal Crackers and The Good Thief. I liked it so much, I’ll quote her instead:

"There is a kind of magic that happens at the right bar, with the right people, at the right time of night. A certain song comes on the jukebox, the bartender starts to sing, and two people wobble off their stools, lean into each other, and begin to sway. For a moment, it feels like the center of the world. Later, at the Bar is seasoned with characters who live for this kind of magic , who love hard and drink harder. Rebecca Barry skillfully weaves together their stories as if she is making her way through a room full of friends, then finds you a seat at the bar, leans over, and spills all of their secrets. They are full of heartache and hope, and you will want to stay with them, until everyone puts down their drinks and starts to dance."

The tavern in Barry’s story was founded by Lucy, nurtured it because she “loved live music and dancing and understood people who liked longing more than they did love – it became the center of the community.”

However it is not merely the center: it’s the lynch-pin.

When I first heard of this book, I thought it was a collection of short stories about individuals who frequent a bar, that each story may, or may not, be related to one another.

This is not the case. Yes, each chapter can stand on its own, but the author skillfully integrates one into another that this truly is ‘a novel in stories’.

I like the contemporary tone of the story and the characters written so well I actually recognized a few of them. They reminded me of someone I once knew – or still know.

It is this more than anything that struck me hardest. I used to watch Monday Night Football religiously at a restaurant/bar and formed strong friendships with some of the other patrons as well as some of the staff. In doing so you learn a lot about people. Sometimes even yourself.

These are the memories Barry’s writing brought back. She also shows the potentiality of what may have happened had many of those relationships continued through the amount of time that passes in Later, at the Bar. And if they remained centered around a bar.

I read this for a Read-A-Thon, and I have to say it was my favorite. Definitely a keeper, and definitely worth 5 Stars!

If you believe that drunks and barflies are nice people and loyal friends, you'll probably like this book. Otherwise, it gets a solid "meh."

I liked the book well enough, but given all the praise, I expected something pretty great. It wasn't. For me, only two of the characters were compelling and they even seemed pretty standard. The linkages between the stories is handled well, and it's refreshing to leave the bar and get a broader sense of the (often sad) lives of these characters. But Later At the Bar is much like being in a bar yourself. There are some good times to be had, the drunks are kind of interesting, but in the end their antics are a little tiring and you want nothing more than to send them off for some strong coffee and go back to your sober life.½

http://tinyurl.com/5lrzns

I feel about this book as an amateur Amazon reader did: 5-star book with a 3-star end. Although, I might be so bold as to say it was a 1-star end.

After all the studied and meticulous portrayal of characters, those that no matter how sad and lonely they are and despite all their missteps you appreciate for who they are and why they are, Barry ends the book with a sentiment that I could not get behind.

Yes, all these characters hang out in a bar and drink a lot. And are clearly drunks. But we care for them because of their life choices, not their drinking (albeit its own life choice). Consequently, the sentiment "Say what you will about drunks . . . but no one will love you like they can" sounds like it's all well and good to be a drunk. In fact, it's better to be a drunk.

Ugh. How unfortunate, as Barry really can write. I suppose one could argue that drinking being such a central theme of the stories, it had to be tied into the last paragraph. Instead, I think the more prominent theme of "gee, life's a pain, and most people never, ever learn to figure it out, but continue onwards anyway" should have gotten final billing.½

Loved this little book of small town living and the tormented yet funny lives they lived and shared at a local bar.

Very readable, light-hearted and affectionate look at the lives (truthfully, mostly love lives) of the habituees of a small town bar. These losers who are maybe actually winners are pretty far-fetched characters but hey, it's fiction after all. Reads like a novel.½

Writer Walks Into a Bar....

The literature of alcohol is a tricky field for new writers to enter. There's the constant risk of slipping into lazy clichés as well-worn as the overlapping water rings on a bar (see what I mean?). Then, too, so many masters of fiction have already gone before and blazed a brilliant trail--William Kennedy's Ironweed, Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," and nearly everything written by John Cheever. In the hands of the right writer, booze-soaked fiction can be--yes, I'll say it--intoxicating.

Now along comes Rebecca Barry with Later, at the Bar, a collection of linked stories which revolve around the barflies of Lucy's Tavern in upstate New York. More than a credible example of "Lost Weekend" Fiction, Barry's debut succeeds largely on the merits of her pared-down style and her obvious love for the characters she's created. Most of these people are on slippery slopes of self-pity and regret, but Barry tenderly gives them occasional glimmers of redemption and hope.

The small-town universe of Later, at the Bar is rife with the kind of drama found in soap operas and country-western songs: failed marriages, one-night stands, terminal illness, scrapes with the law, loneliness, bitterness and pent-up anger. The characters converge at Lucy's Tavern, but Barry does not confine the action to just that dim, smoky interior. The opening story (unfortunately the weakest of the bunch) tells us that Lucy's is a place where "bad behavior within reason was perfectly acceptable," a place where "most people in town came to lick their wounds or someone else's, or to give in to the night and see what would happen."

In the course of the book, we meet several recurring characters. There's advice columnist Linda Hartley, "who wouldn't set foot in the bar without high heels and a soft sweater"; there's Grace Meyers who "was nice to look at in an unreachable way"; and there's Grace's ex-husband Harlin who promised himself when he got out of jail "he would live a quieter, more peaceful life...by drinking at home, counting to ten before hitting anyone, and staying away from women, his ex-wife Grace especially, but all other women as well."

Even as Harlin says this, we know he'll break that vow the first lonely Saturday night he ends up back at Lucy's Tavern slumped on his stool and desperately throwing pick-up lines in Grace's direction. Harlin is the most interesting character in the book's large cast. Here he is, wallowing in nostalgia:

This part of the world was changing, Harlin thought. When he and Cyrus were young, it had been full of cornfields and livestock and fantastic drunks like Harlin's dad, who jumped through plate-glass windows and set fire to abandoned houses. Now the landscape was being eaten up by new houses big enough for three families, with treeless front lawns and oversize plastic play sets.

Harlin, Grace, Linda, Cyrus, Hank, Bill, Benny, Jimmy and all the rest always return to Lucy's Tavern because it is comfortable, familiar and always ready to provide solace in an ever-shifting world. Sometimes that comfort comes from a shot glass and sometimes from a sympathetic listening ear at the next barstool.

Barry knows when to let the story spin itself out at its own pace, and when to jab the reader with a punchy sentence like "The trouble with his new wife, (Harlin) said, was that she had terrible taste in men." She even gets good mileage out of hackneyed clichés. Like the country-western songs that sob from the jukebox, all the familiar love-em-and-leave-em stories are on parade here. Yet, in Barry's hands, the time-worn feels fresh.

One story, "Men Shoot Things to Kill Them," has its emotional climax when Harlin and his brother Cyrus come across a pair of injured Canada geese in the middle of the road. The fact that the birds mate for life is not lost on either man-—both of whom find themselves unable to stay attached to one woman for much more than a year at a time. Harlin and Cyrus go limp with indecision: should they put the birds out of their misery or let nature take its course? It's up to Cyrus' ex-wife Janet to take action; she gets a shotgun and shoots the mortally-wounded female, leading Harlin to conclude, "Men shoot things to kill them, women shoot things to save them."

Later, at the Bar is full of gem-like moments where characters, with nothing better to do than drink and think, have a knack for saying what they really feel, no matter the consequences (and the stakes are usually very high for these characters). One barfly neatly expresses the sum total of the stories here when she remarks, "Say what you will about drunks, but no one will love you like they can."

Ultimately, Later, at the Bar is less about inebriation than it is grasping at second, third and even fourth chances for better lives. This is inspiring fiction which just happens to be set in a room filled with smoke, sad songs and slurred words.½