ONBOOKS | OPINION: Kevin Barry’s word-drunk and woozy ‘The Heart in Winter’

I am a language guy.

Not every writer is -- the bestseller lists are rife with happy souls free to employ whatever word occurs. But I stand with Flaubert, for whom the synonym was mythic as the unicorn, and Miller Williams, who knew that words are haunted and throw shadows.

Some people get annoyed at poetry, taking it all for frou-frou and obscurification. For some people a novel like Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker," which relies on quasi-illiterate, largely phonetic spelling to imagine a post-apocalyptic England that had been bombed back to the Iron Age, is simply impenetrable. In "Riddley Walker," Hoban used a sometimes elaborate blend of puns, colloquialisms and dialect to invent a kind of devolved English. "Inland," in Hoban's future, translates to "England."