He could find himself, say, in a barracks on New Year’s Eve in Afghanistan, the simple notion of a soldier - let’s say a young woman, a Marine, slightly exhausted by war, sitting on the edge of a valley, in the cold, surrounded by sandbags, in the vast clock-tick quiet, looking eastward, under a steel mesh of stars, all silence, not even the thrup of machine-gun fire in the distance, the grim perimeter of her reality set against the possibility of what might be happening at home, in South Carolina, let’s say a relentless suburb of no great distinction, a Legoland, a house gone slightly sour with the years, a broken gray drainpipe hanging down, with a boy in the driveway, in a striped shirt and torn jeans, and a bicycle laying forlorn at his feet, her brother perhaps, maybe even her son. One morning in late August he landed on the idea that there could be something military about it. He wondered how he would push into the territory of New Year’s Eve - create a series of fireworks perhaps, or allow snow to slowly scatter across the face of a windowpane?Īll the stories he wrote walked themselves into the dark.

For a few weeks in late summer he cast about, chased ideas and paragraphs, left a few hanging, found himself abandoning them. He had agreed to write a short story set in and around New Year’s Eve, but he found himself a little adrift, struggling.

Transatlantic colum mccann summary