Albany, New York, matters in the novel as both Steve’s home and the source of the family and political history he shares with Kristín. His account links an Irish-American family’s gradual rise to his questions about the United States’ military presence abroad, making the city a personal starting point for a wider conversation about belonging and power.

Steve’s Home and Family History

Steve first corrects his own description of himself: he is not simply a New Yorker, but from Albany, New York. He presents the city as a place with a substantial Irish community, including many people named Quinn. His great-grandparents emigrated from Ireland around the turn of the century to escape poverty and settled there with their family.

The family’s fortunes improved over generations, but not all at once. Steve describes his great-grandparents living hand to mouth while leaving their children better off. His grandfather entered the wholesale business, importing goods from Ireland, and made a decent living; Steve’s father took over the business. Steve is careful to describe it as comfortable rather than an empire. Albany thus enters his story through both inherited hardship and steady economic advancement.

Military Service and Political Questions

Steve connects Albany’s Irish-American community to the wars the United States fought in Europe, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. He says that its people joined the army because they believed their country needed them, despite not seeing themselves as soldiers by nature. In his account, military service is part of the community’s history, not an abstraction detached from family and place.

That inheritance stands beside Steve’s own choice of study. He says he pursued political science to understand why the United States established bases in places such as Iceland and how it came to act as the world’s police force. His explanation makes Albany the starting point for a question he carries into Iceland: how personal histories of service and patriotism relate to the reach of American power.

The Conversation with Kristín

Steve tells Kristín about Albany while the two are discussing how little they know of one another and the hostility surrounding American military presence in Iceland. He acknowledges that he has hardly gotten to know the place, then tries to connect their backgrounds through the suggestion that Icelanders descend from the Irish. Kristín answers with the more specific account of Irish hermits who lived in Iceland more than a thousand years earlier.

The exchange does not erase the tension between them, but it gives their conversation a point of contact: Albany’s Irish-American identity meets an Icelandic memory of early Irish visitors. The city is never presented through a visit or a physical description; it is evoked through Steve’s account, where family migration, work, military service, and political curiosity converge.