Its time to read Claire Keegan, one of Irelands best writers
“You know what is at the heart of misogyny?” a character asks in the title story of Claire Keegan’s “So Late in the Day.” “It’s simply about not giving. … Whether it’s believing you should not give us the vote or not give help with the dishes.” The three pieces in Keegan’s latest collection, subtitled “Stories of Women and Men,” revolve around uneasy, sometimes violent tension in loveless marriages, failed relationships and chance encounters alike. Spanning 25 years of Keegan’s career, they trace a current of violent chauvinism from the subtle to the overt. Together they give an image of men defined by sickly hunger, brittle pride, and a growing rage at the slow waning of their social and political power.
Keegan has already had a long and lauded career, especially in her home country, Ireland. But the adaptation of her novella “Foster” into the Oscar-nominated “The Quiet Girl” in 2022, and the release of her exceptional follow-up, “Small Things Like These,” the year before, have raised her profile enormously in the United States.
The stories in “So Late in the Day” make for a compelling sample of the questions that have long powered her work. In this volume, male rage becomes more subtle as the stories go on, leaving the reader feeling as if they are burrowing through the muck from contemporary hate to its origins. Cathal, in the title story, whose fiancé has left him after many unforgivable acts of coldness, contemplates his mistakes and the legacy of his father, settling eventually into a curious mixture of regret and hatred. In “The Long and Painful Death,” a woman trying to enjoy a writer’s retreat is bothered and eventually berated by an odd man who “could neither create conversation nor respond nor be content to have none.” The protagonist of “Antarctica,” looking for a one-night stand, finds instead a desperate and dangerous man. Each story balances somewhere between the frustration and fear of lonely men and the way their greed and hunger grow in the dark.
Advertisement
Miserliness — not just of money, but also of love and kindness — has always partly animated Keegan’s characters. One of them is a young girl “whose father has never given her so much as a tender word.” Another remembers how she never saw her parents touch, and a third languishes in a crowded, loveless home before she is sent away to live with relatives. It is no surprise that the new volume begins with an epigraph by Philip Larkin, as here baleful traits are passed again and again from father to son. Cathal, in his glum reverie, recalls a moment when his father, for no reason other than his own amusement, pulled a chair from under his wife as she finally sat down to eat after a day spent taking care of others. Cathal had laughed along at his mother’s humiliation.
“Small Things Like These,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, lays credible claim in less than 150 pages to being the best Irish book of the 21st century. There is hardly a word misspent in its story of conformity and resistance. Still, it was not obviously primed for American success. Set in the southeast of Ireland in 1982, the book exhibits an uncompromising verisimilitude. Full of specificity, it doesn’t stop to explain its small details, from the scraps of Irish language that crop up to its mention of the Texaco Prize or the social protection offered by being a part of the Protestant world. Keegan trusts the reader to interpret the signs: the nuns talking only to the better-off parents, a poor child drinking milk from a cat’s saucer. Using deft strokes, she builds the Ireland of the early ’80s, superficially modernized but gripped by severe economic distress and a reactionary alliance of church and state, exhibiting the trademark violence of the powerful under threat.
Across her oeuvre, Keegan illuminates violence better than almost anyone, avoiding easy didacticism. She pulls apart the strands of misogyny in individuals and institutions, diagnosing the same problem in both. She connects the violence of the past to that of the present, and domestic violence to state violence. In “Small Things Like These,” Ireland is a jail, one where the prisoners are also the guards, gleefully gossiping, kowtowing and reporting one another for perceived indiscretions. The whole country is like a small town, obsessed with minor scandals while major ones go unheralded and unpunished. Obvious poverty is explained away, with characters observing that “some of [them] bring hardship on themselves.” And near the convent, where nuns live in comfort, is a prison for young girls dressed up as a refuge, a Magdalene laundry. Here Keegan refocuses the abuse away from pious morality and toward its true commercial heart: the laundry is used by every local business; they depend on the slave labor of the girls to keep going. The nuns control not only the laundry but also the “good” school, and by extension the power to determine what is and is not a “good” family. This is not an aberration; it is the system. Such social control works best in parlous times.
Advertisement
Keegan’s rising popularity in the United States serves as an interesting mirror for how Ireland is currently viewed by U.S. progressives. Long a conservative bastion, the country is now one of the few places in Europe moving leftward. First divorce was legalized, then same-sex marriage, then abortion. The church retains power in schools and other institutions, but has a severely diminished presence in Irish society. In this light, Keegan’s bracing stories of misogyny might offer some kind of solace for Americans who have just witnessed the sudden and brutal curtailment of rights once thought undeniable. Perhaps the fight isn’t lost, perhaps a stand isn’t futile.
And for all its pinpoint diagnoses of male violence, Keegan’s work suggests that men, too, can free themselves. Her two novels contain decent men who stand outside of the cruelty of their fellows, aware of it, troubled by it. These are people who have responded to their good fortune and their social isolation by trying to protect those who are subject to all-encompassing violence. That Larkin epigraph, from “Aubade”:
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Throughout her career, Keegan seems to emphasize that we take nothing with us and that all that matters is what we give each other.
Jack Sheehan is a writer, historian and photographer from Dublin.
So Late in the Day
Stories of Women and Men
By Claire Keegan
Grove. 119 pp. $20
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYmh8cn6OaWlom5yWtrOxjKScnp%2BRo3qtrdOeZJ2ZqWK2s7XSoWSfoZOptrC6jg%3D%3D