Illustration: Lara Harwood/Heartagency.com

A new Irish literary boom: the post-crash stars of fiction

Dynamic, radical, often female … Irish fiction is flourishing. Gone is the conservative writing – all nostalgia and sexual repression – of the Celtic Tiger years. The writers of the new wave are original and bold

Justine Jordan

Saturday 17 October 2015

“Money kills the imagination,” says the narrator of Claire Kilroy’s 2012 novel The Devil I Know, a fiendishly good satire of the moment the Irish boom went bust. “It makes us want the same thing.” The book is set in 2016 and takes the form of one man’s testimony to a tribunal intended to uncover the sleaze and short-termism that enabled a giant property bubble to inflate in the years leading up to the global financial crash of 2008. In the autumn of 2015, we have not yet caught up with Kilroy’s future setting, but as the real-world aftershocks of the Celtic Tiger’s downfall continue, one Irish sector is booming: with the rise of a new wave of writers, from Paul Murray, Kevin Barry and Donal Ryan to first-time authors such as Eimear McBride, Sara Baume, Lisa McInerney and Colin Barrett, there is a palpable energy to Irish fiction.

My hero / David Foster Wallace by Colin Barrett

David Foster Wallace by Hannah Agosta

My hero:

David Foster Wallace by Colin Barrett

Infinite Jest, a novel brimming with compassion and empathy, left me euphoric and burdened, and made me want to be a better writer

 Saturday 12 July 2014

I

was in the long, sullen afternoon of my early 20s, contentedly directionless, occupying an office cubicle from Monday to Friday and writing gruesomely mannered and mercifully short poems, hungover, on Sundays. I wanted to be a writer, but was worried I only wanted to be a writer because I wanted to be a writer.

David Foster Wallace

I read Infinite Jest on my weekday tram commute over a summer. Just over 1,000 pages long, heavily influenced by the dense, formally daunting works of Pynchon, Gaddis and McElroy, Infinite Jest is a crypto-apocalyptic, science-fiction-tainted satire and tragedy. It's about a great many things, from tennis and addiction to roving packs of giant feral hamsters and militant Quebecois wheelchair assassins, but beneath its almost defensively elaborate postmodern conceits is a novel brimming with extraordinary compassion and empathy.