The Lights of New York

Irish American journalist Dan Barry of the New York Times has just released a new book, City Lights, a collection of the best stories from his old column "About New York." CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to the Pulitzer Prize winning author about his life and work, and his passion for the city where eight million stories unfold each day.

Dan Barry loves New York with the same bug-eyed wonder that tourists gaping at the Empire State Building for the first time do. He also knows its back streets and the hardy folk who live and work there like a born and bred local. But the fact is that Barry isn't a local. An Irish American kid from Long Island, in many ways he's an eternal outsider looking in - and that's probably the secret of his success with The New York Times, where from June 2003 until November 2006 he wrote the celebrated "About New York" column. His new book City Lights (St. Martin's Press) is a collection of his best stories.

Gifted with a poet's eye for detail, and a historian's ability to see the ghostly connections between the past and the present, Barry can certainly write with facility about the glittering skyscrapers, but his point of view is almost always human scale and intimate.

Even in the greatest love affairs you sometimes have to look twice to see the beauty that's right in front of you. And so it is with New York City, a city so vast, so ostentatiously magnificent that sometimes it's essential to see it reflected through the written word, to make better sense of what you're actually seeing.

To see what's right in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle, wrote George Orwell, but for Barry it's second nature, or it seems to be. Barry's passion for New York illuminates every page of his new book, as time and again he succumbs to two of the most Irish of all impulses, to celebrate or lament (sometimes simultaneously).

As a collection, City Lights is as evocative and redolent of the true sights and sounds of the metropolis as the work of E.B. White and James Baldwin. There's passion beneath the words, and great good humor too, and the writing fairly crackles with the demonic energy of the city itself.

This week he spoke to the Irish Voice about his background and decision to release the new collection.

"I always knew I wanted to be a reporter, a famous magazine writer, but as you know there's no posting in the classifieds for a famous magazine writer," said Barry. "So for a few years after I graduated in 1980 I just banged around, I dug ditches, I worked in delis and I wound up going to graduate school at NYU on a poor boy's scholarship."

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