Nobody could accuse Claire Keegan of being overly prolific. In the past 24 years she has written two highly regarded collections of short stories: her 1999 debut, Antarctica, and then, almost ten years later, Walk the Blue Fields (2008). In 2010 the novella Foster, a superbly moving story of a neglected Irish girl who is farmed out to kind strangers, was a critical hit. Another 11 years passed before, at last, a (slim) novel appeared. Small Things Like These, the story of an Irish father who finds a young girl locked by nuns in a freezing coal shed, brought Keegan to a much wider readership. It was short-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize and is being made into a film starring Cillian Murphy.
Now, with hungry readers snapping, Keegan’s publisher, Faber, is offering “So Late in the Day” as a stand-alone short story. This autumn it will republish the two story collections. Faber must be desperate for new works, but Keegan, thank goodness, is resisting any pressure to produce more words. “What pleases me,” she once told an interviewer, “is brevity.”
Brevity is unusually satisfying in Keegan’s hands. Even in her earliest stories she is a superb stylist: every well-structured paragraph contains multitudes; at sentence level there is a febrile power to her word choices and rhythms. This might all sound a bit cerebral, even precious, but — unlike some of her more prolix peers — there is no overthinking or showing off. Instead, Keegan offers plausibility rooted in vivid details that generate a complex emotional authenticity. It is incredibly engrossing.
“So Late in the Day” is an ostensibly quiet story about a relationship gone wrong. Nothing earth-shattering happens. But it is riveting. Cathal, an accounts manager based in Dublin, meets Sabine on a boring work trip. Things progress from them spending weekends at his seaside home to her moving in. Everything is seen through Cathal’s eyes, but slowly a damning portrait of masculinity emerges — specifically of modern misogyny, which might be better hidden these days, but is as destructive as ever.
Claire Keegan, thank goodness, is resisting any pressure to produce more words.
Keegan likes to open stories with a nod, hint or sideways glance at a past event, planting questions in the reader’s mind that demand answers. Here, the opening sentence presents an odd specificity: “On Friday, July 29th Dublin got the weather that was forecast.” Why this day, not another? Why does weather matter? These questions will be answered in full, but for now there is only unease.
As Cathal watches the summery day from his office window, it is clear, from a few slightly jarring words, that he is in a fragile, isolated state: the sun is “brazen”, swallows are “in camaraderie”.
Keegan skips back a year to show us why. Petite, half-French and with a slight squint, Sabine likes to walk barefoot on the beach even in winter. She is associated with abundance: foraging for mushrooms and hazelnuts, cooking delicious meals, shopping “freely” at the farmers’ market. When she moves in, Cathal is alarmed by all her possessions. She is “just too much reality”. They get a cat, decide to marry. Each step, although chosen, is an imposition. Sabine, Cathal realizes, “would not listen, and wanted to do a good half of things her own way”. He is outraged when he must buy $7 worth of cherries for her clafoutis. When an antique ring must be expensively resized, all his resentment erupts and he feels “the long shadow of his father’s language crossing over his life”. Before long, he is thinking of Sabine — of all women — as “c***s”.
It is a brilliant and compassionate anatomy of misogyny: the inherited emotional stinginess, the terror of women who take up space, the bewildered emotional paucity from which it all springs. Misogyny, in fact, lies at the heart of so many Keegan stories. Her girls and women are brutalized by floundering men, yet a powerful core somehow remains ungovernable.
Keegan grew up on an Irish farm and her women are tangled in the landscape, battling ever-changing skies or teetering above dangerous seas. Barefoot Sabine belongs to a proud lineage of witchy Keegan women: the female writer who fantasies about an intrusive German academic’s demise in “The Long and Painful Death”; Martha, the raging wife who destroys her husband through storytelling in “The Forester’s Daughter”; wild Margaret Flusk in “Night of the Quicken Trees,” who inherits a priest’s house and burns all his furniture.
In “So Late in the Day” misogyny plays out in a contemporary world of Nikes and Netflix, but shares a root system with the sexually abusive father, the philandering husband, the predatory priest. She constructs her stories from a skeleton of inferences that rise, gloriously, to form complex urges, crimes, desires, rebellions and, crucially, universal truths.
Each brief work is worth the wait: Keegan is something special.
Lucy Atkins is a literary critic for The Sunday Times and the author of several novels, including Windmill Hill, Magpie Lane, and The Night Visitor