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The work of Claire Keegan: Can you ever have the same thing twice?

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66March/April 2022WEXFORD-BORN CLAIRE Keegan burst in on the Irish literary world in 1999 with her aptly named collection of short stories, ‘Antarctica’. These studies in extremity were followed by another collection, ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ (2008), which saw Keegan apply a less heady, more sedate artistry. But it was in 2010 that ‘Foster’, her novella and winner of the Davy Byrne’s Award for Irish Writing, frst located her alongside Maeve Brennan, William Trevor and John McGahern as one the fnest The work of Claire Keegan: Can you ever have the same thing twice?The ideal short story is like a knifeWhen working within the confnes of a short story, the result will either work or it won’t.practitioners of the short form. After an eleven-year-long wait Keegan has resurfaced with the highly anticipated ‘Small Things Like These’, another miniature study. Many writers have agonised over that perfect thing, that mythic little creature, the short story: so favoured and pursued and perfected, most obvious–ly by the great minds of Irish and American storytell–ing. Still more voices have sought to conjure the ex–act formula required for its construction. Where does that instinct come from we may wonder, the instinct By Nadia WhistonCULTURE
March/April 2022 67to categorise the elements that must combine to ensure that a miniature work of art happens in the way it is meant to. Perhaps this aware–ness tells us that, when working within the confnes of a short story, the result will either work or it won’t. It is either a perfect thing or is not. The success of the thing is absolute.For F Scott Fitzgerald the secret lay in fnd–ing the “key emotion”. Michael Swanwick felt that the short story “should be something that can be held in the mind all in one piece”, that the “ideal short story is like a knife – strongly made, well balanced, and with an absolute minimum of moving parts”. Claire Keegan’s ‘Foster’ (originally pub–lished as a short story in the New Yorker, later as a novella by Faber) has haunted readers for a long time. It is the type of story that comes to rest in you. When you think of it, you can feel it there, the way you remember the feeling of your dog’s head in your hands, its weight, its memory. It tells the story of an unnamed 10-year-old narrator and her stay with the Kinsellas on their farm in Wexford in the hot summer of 1989. Her mother is pregnant again and she is to stay with them until she is called back. It is the familiarity of ‘Foster’, its clarity, its specifc mode of humanness which makes it a difcult book to get over. Linguistically it is propelled by the purity of vision in the describ–ing ‘I’ of the narrator. Her essential innocence acknowledges and uncovers, without senti–mentality, the pain of the adults whose world she enters. She enables their grief to breathe, to be understood. And while she tells us who they are, about the tenderness with which they treat her, we come to glimpse her pain and her longing. With remarkable, bafing, simplicity readers are reminded of the imperative for, and the exquisite consequences of, afection; of our need for it, of the moment when we re–alise what having it feels like, of the moment when it gets taken away from us. In ‘Foster’Keegan re-entered, shape-shifter-like, into a space she had occupied before. In her debut, ‘Antarctica’, Keegan had stepped weightlessly a handful of times into the soul of a pre-adolescent girl. It is a role over which she displays quixotic power. One which, by vir–tue perhaps of its timing, ofers the author the ability to intercede upon the privacy of their thoughts, capturing them with a light androgy–nous hand. These very young women are often watching their mothers, see their fathers mis–understand – often mistreat – their mothers, they watch their mothers try to be women, try to be mothers, they watch their mothers fall, retreat, rebel and collapse. Interestingly and refreshingly, their almost tomboyish observa–tions ofer no feminist stance, no pointed or driven critiques. The women’s tales are set among the very physical provincialism of rural Ireland, root–ing them in an earthy salty muddy very real and quite asexual nightmare. Humanness is positioned directly against the elemental; the harsh demands of life take the form of trau–matised chickens. Heifers cry and moan and bewildered sheep are driven to the sales in the boot of the family Volkswagen. There is a degree of comedy which binds the margins be–tween nature and love, sex and violence very close together, and it has the efect of neutral–ising the many elements, establishing them as inseparable forces; capturing the ofbeat, awkward, cruel, often tragic reality of human existence. But through all of this Keegan exerts an im–pressive control over her visions which prohib–its drama. And unlike, for example, the important voice of feminist short-story-teller, Meave Kelly, Keegan communicates the devastating emo–tion of her stories with images rather than by lines of reported thought: we are not told what to feel, nor what our characters feel, instead meaning is trapped inside the images of what our characters see. The efect is not strident, it does not protest; it is evocative, poetic and necessary. The androgyny of Keegan’s voice draws un–expected comparison with other Irish voices in literature. Colin Barrett’s ‘Young Skins’ (a collection When you think of Keegan’s ‘Foster’, you can feel it there, the way you remember the feeling of your dog’s head in your hands, its weight, its memoryfrom 2013 which won the Frank O ‘Connor International Short Story Award, the Rooney Prize for Literature, and the Guardian First Book Award) has the abrasive power of early Keegan. Barrett’s ‘Bat’, like Keegan’s ‘Love in the Tall Grass’,is one of the fnest studies of a life I have ever read. Unlike the author of ‘Foster’, Barrett chooses as his constant stage the Irish provincial town; his hero the male adolescent. His characters do not witness sexuality, they are instead, inside it. They are dominated, inhabited and driven by it. Barrett, like Keegan, knows that desire is as much about loss as it is about gain, a characteristic which lends both au–thors their timelessness, though they choose their entry points diferently. They also share an ability to look calmly upon violence as just another basic instinct. In her collection, ‘The China Factory’ (2012), however, Mary Costello could be said to refect Keegan’s more feminine side. Yet the intensity is more measured. Her characters swallow their tears and hide their pains away in small, tidy rooms.Inthese tales tragic facts depart their author in elegant exact detail. A retiring school teacher prepares herself to see the fa–ther of the child she gave up forty years before at the retirement party provided for her by the parish; a married woman attends the funeral of her former husband, a man she still loves,
68March/April 2022but a man she blames for the death of their only child. Costello’s frst ofering deals with the dif–fcult and the very personal with deft, even, poise; and like Keegan acknowledges that guilt can be felt by even the kindest and most loyal among us. But of the three Keegan’s frst collection remains the most humorous, the most diver–gent. The expanse of Keegan’s ‘Antarctica’, the astonishing breadth of some of its stories, lay in its dissection and mapping out of a particu–lar emotional moment which, when it erupts, shatters the line of events which lead up to it. Within the collapse of one moment, the image of an entire life is contained.In ‘Walk the Blue Fields’, Keegan’s second collection, perhaps it can be said that she sought to mature. Her central characters were no longer children. Instead of examining a mo–ment of explosion she looked towards the mo–ment which regrettably, inevitably, followed. ‘Walk the Blue Fields’is about stasis, regret, its characters are inefective, have been bit–ter and are now ambivalent, even towards their pain. As a collection it lacks the soulful, ragged spikiness of ‘Antarctica’. While the human element is still there, it feels as though Keegan is reaching towards it and missing: things do not bind and tie. How–ever, what the two collections do share at their core is Keegan’s unobtrusive care for the psy–chological.Both ‘Antarctica’ and ‘Foster’ contain the power of Fitzgerald’s “key”, of Swanwick’s knife hidden in sheets of silk. In Foster we move with our narrator, we share her bag of sweets, we feel her shame when she wakes af–ter her frst night, having wet the bed, we can understand the great agony of leave-taking from a place where she has been happy. What I believe everyone hoped in October of this year was to wake and go out and buy a copy of something like ‘Foster’ again, because we haven’t been able to fnd anything like it since. In her latest novel, ‘Small Things Like These’, Keegan takes her attention away from blasted felds and hermetic deep-country dwellings and away from relationships of quiet, constant violence. This novel unfolds in the town of New Ross. It is 1985, the country is in recession, people are frightened and vulnerable, and it is almost Christmas. We meet Bill Furlong, a coal merchant. Bill is clean, hard working, has “good Protestant habits…never developed a taste for the drink…never has anything owing”. This is according to his wife, Eileen, who is very happy to remind both him and us: “We never have anything ow–ing”. They have fve daughters, each well be–haved and high-achieving, each with a future and balanced temperament. I wondered, rather immediately, where the nuanced and of-kilter individ–uals of Keegan’s previous com–positions had gone. But what we discover is that Keegan has a second subject in this story, which is to work in tandem with the study of small-town-Ireland family life. ‘Small Things Like These’ (110 pages), like ‘Foster’before it (88 pages) is very short. It can be read in an hour. Keegan dedicated it to the women and children of Ireland who suf–fered incarceration and mis–treatment in the Magdalene Laundries.We learn that early in life Bill Furlong had a lucky es–cape, and that from this good fortune spun a vague cloud of thoughts and feelings which are suggested to us by Keegan, silenced by Eileen and half-digested by Furlong. What Keegan attempts here is very difcult. Choosing once again her short story/novella form she aims not only to ac–knowledge a deeply problem–atic and disturbing fgure in what is Ireland’s still-recent social history, but also tie it to the life and con–sciousness of a very ordinary and somewhat inarticulate man. This sparks a polite though awkward tussle within the novel, between Furlong and his very mundane existence, and the town convent where “the birds, for some reason, had not touched a single berry on the holly bushes… the gardener himself had said so”. This reads as the last truly efective line about the convent. Once Furlong actually gets to it, its power de-activates.This breakdown happens very quickly, and it stems from Keegan’s surprising lack of clarity. I am for the frst time as her reader unsure of her intention. It is not convincing that Fur–long, a man of forty, who has lived in New Ross his whole life, while delivering coal to the premises, appears to see it for the frst time. Less convincing, because it seems the author wishes for us to metaphorically coagulate Fur–long’s suggested emotional distractions with the convent’s presence. Keegan serves up a litany of local hearsay but this too, reads as artifcial. Though it is not as heavy-handed as Furlong’s interactions with the girls he acci–dentally stumbles across during his visit there. Perhaps I am missing the point. But this is a book which is presented as a novel, not non-fction. It is very short and addresses something very big. I do not wish to be seen as dismissing the importance of the subject but the method, which Keegan has proven herself to be so adroit with in the past, snags in ‘All The Small Things’. The application of the state of mind of someone who has mercifully not sufered the violence he later in life must suddenly confront, does not work. Fitzgerald’s “key emotion” is never identifed. We are left to contemplate any number of things: survi–vor’s guilt, grief, depression, but it could also be something simpler.In the images drawn of his family life, Fur–long is sometimes afected by the claustro–phobia of his domesticity, bafed, in fact, by how “mechanically” they moved on from one thing to the next, how there is no time ofered to refect, and certainly not with a wife like Ei–leen. Does Keegan wish Furlong’s past to be the hinge on which the novel turns? Is it merely Of Barrett, Costello and Keegan the last’s frst collection remains the most humorous, the most divergent
March/April 2022 69a coincidence? Is Furlong having a mid-life crisis? What seems clear is that Furlong is too straightfor–ward a construction to harness the complexities of a story he does not seem to understand himself.The novel will end with an act of kindness which is also a rebellion. Furlong will walk the streets of New Ross on Christmas Eve beside a barefoot girl with long black toenails. Furlong, we will be told, “never felt so high”. Perhaps out of goodness, Keegan for the frst time in her writing emotes and moralises. But it seems unbalanced. This is a novel which has been called “hopeful” by many critics. However, in its closing pages it takes simplicity and good will too far. What could have been a heroic, poignant act seems highly self-conscious and disingenuous. If this was exoneration, for Furlong; retribution per–haps, it seems rather showy, and it seems rather late. Perhaps my fair reading of ‘Small Things Like These’ was hindered by my expectation. But the ex–pectation was of an author who would charge the smallest human gestures with profound, virtually painful, signifcance: a lifetime’s worth of it. What I wanted from this novel was the everlasting moonlit beach walk the narrator of ‘Foster’ shared with Kinsella, where he tells her: “You know the fshermen sometimes fnd horses out at sea. A man I know towed a colt in one time and the horse lay down for a long time before he got up. And he was perfect. Tiredness was all it was, after being out so long”. Or the moment in ‘Antarctica’’s, ‘Men and Women’, when a twelve-year-old girl sees her father slow-dance with a woman who is not her mother. While everybody is busy watching, the daughter in–terrupts them, asking: “Can I dance with my daddy please”.What I wanted was Keegan’s subtlety, her ability to unearth meaning without needing to explain it. What is missing in her latest work is the moment where kindness, where truth, does appear, out of the dark, suddenly and completely, like a knife. The concern of ‘Small Things Like Things’ is enormously sensitive. It is a story which should and must be heard. And who better than Claire Keegan, I would have thought, to wield a narrative capable of containing the dual forc–es of humanity’s cruelties and kindness? But, where it may work as a story, it does not work as a novel. Perhaps on this occasion Keegan tried to do too much. There are too many voices, too many forces, a coincidence thrown in near the end which seems simply careless, and these things busy this slim book, blocking what should have been the very deli–cate moment at its end. Keegan’s clarity of vision is missing, that ‘key emotion’ and at the end of the book it is Furlong who occupies centrestage rather than the barefoot girl at his side. Unfortunately kind–ness is shown to be something that someone must decide upon, rather than something which comes unbidden out of the dark. But I would hope that Keegan will not keep us wait–ing another eleven years before we hear from her again. For she has been missed. Keegan’s ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ is about stasis, regret, its characters are ineffective, have been bitter and are now ambivalent, even towards their pain. As a collection it lacks the soulful, ragged spikiness of ‘Antarctica’

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