A Party on Chappaquiddick, a Gun in the Bedroom
Vincenzo Barney's third chapter of Still Soft With Sleep drops the narrator and his friend Elvis into a birthday party at the McConnel family "cottage" on Chappaquiddick Island, Martha's Vineyard. What follows is an evening of extraordinary social tension, casual wealth, reckless firearms use, and a death that reframes everything that came before it. Barney, a Vanity Fair contributor who wrote this novel as his senior thesis at Bennington, demonstrates a sharp ear for dialogue and an instinct for letting class dynamics reveal themselves through the smallest gestures.
The chapter opens at a dinner for about forty guests. The patriarch, Frank McConnel, whose brother reportedly bankrupted the Dodgers, dominates the table not through force but through sheer indifference. Barney captures him perfectly through rhythm and repetition:
"You could tell how much money he was worth because he took as much time as he felt like before answering questions in one syllable, 'Yeah' or 'No' or 'Sure.'"
The exchange between Frank, his son Hampton, and Caleb about the swordfish is comedy worthy of a stage play. Frank narrates the obvious. Hampton echoes his father. The word "good stuff" ricochets between them like a verbal tic passed down through generations of entitlement. Barney invents the phrase "wealthy pause" to describe Frank's silences, and it earns its place immediately.
The Theater of Privilege
What makes this chapter work is Barney's refusal to editorialize too heavily. The satire lives in the details. Hampton gets credit for grilling swordfish he barely touched. The women at the party are described as "halfbeautiful," attractive not from anything intrinsic but because they are "bland and wealthy enough to mask themselves with that wealthy-beautiful look." Chris, the birthday boy, delivers a speech from a podium. At his own twenty-seventh birthday party. For forty-eight people.
"Probably just by not dying, right?" Elvis whispered to me.
Elvis and the narrator exist at the margins of this world. They are young enough to be desired by the older guests but self-aware enough to keep their distance. They roll their eyes. They steal wine. They are tourists in someone else's money.
Caleb serves as a kind of comic bridge between the two worlds. He sells vape pens with evangelical fervor, pitches phone cameras mid-party, and distributes substances with the casual efficiency of a concierge. His pitch for the vaping industry is delivered with absolute sincerity:
"In ten years, women and housewives are gonna be coming home from work and they're gonna hit this. Gone are the days of red wine to unwind. Gone. It's an inevitability."
It is absurd. It is also, by current trends, not entirely wrong.
The Gun in the Room
The chapter takes a sharp turn when Chris pulls a .44 Magnum from a locked box under his bed. He quotes Dirty Harry. He tosses the loaded weapon to Elvis, who recoils. Then Chris fires it into the air during the birthday fireworks, bullets arcing out over Chappaquiddick with no regard for where they land.
"You know that's really fucking stupid right? Bullets come down," I said when he was done. "Chill dude. We're on Chappy. They might hit a fish out in the water. I do this all the time."
The narrator's protest is mild. Elvis's discomfort is palpable but silent. Neither of them pushes back hard enough to matter. This is the chapter's structural hinge, though Barney does not announce it as such. The gun goes off, the party continues, and only later does the reader learn where those bullets may have gone.
One could argue that the narrator's passivity strains credibility here. Two young men watch a drunk fire a powerful handgun randomly into the night sky, and their response is to steal wine and kayak home. Barney may be making a point about the paralysis that wealth and social pressure create, but the lack of any serious objection risks making both characters seem negligently indifferent rather than merely uncomfortable.
The Kayak and the Subway
The finest writing in the chapter arrives in the kayak ride home. Elvis opens up about his late father, and the conversation is tender without being sentimental. His father earned his wealth, hated the social theater that came with it, and tried to resist the culture it produced. Elvis is trying to honor that resistance.
Then comes a remarkable monologue. Elvis describes a half-sleeping vision rooted in a memory from the New York subway. A toddler pacified by a phone screen. A street band playing violin and cello while commuters stare at nothing. A homeless man sleeping across a bench in the July heat. Elvis saw himself in all of it and none of it:
"I guess I just, whatever, have this bubble around me, because of where I was born, how I was raised, and I hate it, and I have a real choice to just, I don't know, just fly somewhere far away and know no one for a while and leave it all and have a house that you can feel the history in, and the soul in it."
The passage is long, circling, unresolved. It reads like actual speech from someone trying to articulate something they have never said aloud. Barney wisely lets it breathe. The narrator does not interpret or summarize. He simply says, "I think I get it."
Earlier, Elvis offers an observation about grief that carries real weight:
"When it all happens so suddenly, you know? I don't know... You know it, but it takes a long time for it to settle in. For It and your head to get used to each other."
The capitalized "It" is a small, effective choice. Grief becomes a presence, a thing that moves into the mind and has to be accommodated.
The Morning After
Barney saves the chapter's gut punch for the final pages. The narrator arrives at work on the ferry, still drunk, to learn that a woman named Rosie has been killed. A bullet. On Chappaquiddick. The connection to Chris's reckless shooting is never stated outright, but it does not need to be.
The writing shifts register entirely. The comic social satire gives way to something lyrical and physical as the narrator pilots the ferry alone for the first time:
"There is a lot of anticipation involved in driving a boat. You are reading the waves at least thirty feet out at a time, come pouring and developing their size and shape in this zone."
The description of the harbor, the wind, the weight of the ferry against the current, carries the chapter's emotional burden. The narrator is learning to control something heavy and dangerous while processing the possibility that someone he partied with the night before may have killed a woman through sheer carelessness. Barney renders the water as "Debussian wavechords," and the metaphor works because it treats beauty as something that must be actively read and navigated, not passively admired.
The final image is devastating in its restraint. As the ferry pulls away from Chappaquiddick, Chris's house appears and disappears behind the changing landscape, visible only in the corner of the narrator's eye. It spreads open behind his back each time he turns away from it.
"Only as I pulled away did the curtain open itself and show Chris's house, spreading open behind my back."
Bottom Line
Barney's third chapter is the strongest yet in the serialization. The party scenes crackle with dark comedy, the dialogue is precise and socially devastating, and the tonal shift from satire to elegy is handled with real confidence. The gun goes off at the midpoint, and the rest of the chapter lives in its echo. If the prose occasionally leans too heavily on pop-culture similes -- Don Draper, James Dean, Les Grossman, Dirty Harry all within a few pages -- the excess feels appropriate to a narrator swimming in a culture that understands itself primarily through reference. The subway monologue and the ferry piloting are the chapter's twin peaks, one interior and one physical, both about the struggle to see clearly when everything around you is designed to obscure the view. Barney is twenty-two-year-old-thesis good, which at Bennington means better than most published novelists twice his age.