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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
66 March/April 2022
W
EXFORDBORN CLAIRE Keean burst
in on the Irish literary world in
with her aptly named collection of
short stories, ‘Antarctica’. These
studies in extremity were followed by
another collection, ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ (),
which saw Keean apply a less heady, more sedate
artistry. But it was in that ‘Foster’, her novella
and winner of the Davy Byrne’s Award for Irish
Writin, first located her alonside Maeve Brennan,
William Trevor and John McGahern as one the finest
The work of Claire Keegan:
Can you ever have the
same thing twice?
The ideal short story is like a knife
When working
within the
confines of a
short story, the
result will either
work or it won’t.
practitioners of the short form. After an eleven-year-
lon wait Keean has resurfaced with the hihly
anticipated ‘Small Thins 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 Whiston
CULTURE
March/April 2022 67
to 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
confines 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 find
-
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
specific mode of humanness which makes it
a dicult 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, baing, simplicity
readers are reminded of the imperative for,
and the exquisite consequences of, aection;
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, oers 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 oer 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 eect of neutral
-
ising the many elements, establishing them
as inseparable forces; capturing the obeat,
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 eect 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
memory
from 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 finest 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 dierently.
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 reflect
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. In these 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,
68 March/April 2022
but a man she blames for the death of their
only child.
Costello’s first oering deals with the dif
-
ficult 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 first 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 ineective, 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 first 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 find anything like it since.
In her latest novel, ‘Small Things Like These’,
Keegan takes her attention away from blasted
fields 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 five daughters, each well be-
haved and high-achieving, each with a future
and balanced temperament.
I wondered, rather immediately, where the
nuanced and o-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 dicult. Choosing once
again her short story/novella
form she aims not only to ac
-
knowledge a deeply problem-
atic and disturbing figure 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 eective 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 first 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 first 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
artificial. 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-fiction. 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 suered the violence he later in life must
suddenly confront, does not work. Fitzgerald’s
“key emotion” is never identified. 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 aected by the claustro-
phobia of his domesticity, baed, in fact, by
how “mechanically” they moved on from one
thing to the next, how there is no time oered
to reflect, 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 first
collection remains the
most humorous, the most
divergent
March/April 2022 69
a 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 first 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, significance: 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
fishermen sometimes find 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 centre stage 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’
