Foster and So Late In The Day
Few contemporary writers capture life as succinctly as Ireland’s Claire Keegan. Her Small Things Like These (see previous review) is striking in its powerfully efficient prose and moving themes. It was among my favorite reads the year I read it and is a novella I constantly bring up as an excellent example of short but powerful fiction. In March, I read to Keegan’s most recent publication, a collection of three short stories: So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men (2023). Keegan’s books are slender; the sort one sits down and reads in a morning. I looked forward to loose myself among her emotionally charged stories and find resolution, of one sort or another, among their pages. The three stories that comprise So Late in the Day all pack the famous Keegan punch in short order. All deal with men and women (and their relationships with one another) in contemporary Ireland. Each of the three stories are haunting but in wildly different ways.
“So Late in the Day,” the first and titular story, follows a lonely Irish man through a seemingly ordinary day. Keegan builds tension as more and more is uncovered about his story. It is a story about love, disappointment, and the disconnect between Irish men and women. It deals with misogyny, nationalism in the form of prejudice against immigrants, and the utter loneliness that comes with a lack of generosity and overt kindness. Next follows “The Long and Painful Death”. It follows a female writer as she arrives at the home of Heinrich Böll having been awarded a writing residency. It happens to be on the occasion of her birthday and a German professor interrupts her ritual of retreating. Yet one never knows the form one’s muse will arrive in; interruption and a day on the seaside serves as an excellent source of inspiration in this clever little story. It is a story about craft and Keegan crafts it beautifully. She concludes this triptych collection with a truly haunting story about exploration and betrayal in “Antartica.” This story follows a middle-aged mother and wife as she sets off to explore another life for a weekend. Like the explorers who found themselves in over their heads, she may have set off on more of a dangerous adventure than she had planned. The conclusion of this story whispers of Joyce’s “The Dead” with which his famous collection of short stories concludes. Like “The Dead,” “Antartica” is a story that will haunt readers long after they’ve read its last word. Together. These three stories present quite a collection of themes, observations, and cautionary tales relating to contemporary Irish women and men.
Having quickly gotten through So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men, I turned to another Keegan novella: Foster (2010 in Ireland, 2022 in US). While I liked the stories in So Late in the Day, I loved Foster (as I had Small Things Like These). Coming in under 100 pages Keegan loads this story with emotion. It opens as a girl, the eldest in a large family, is sent to stay with people from her mother’s country in south eastern Ireland. The couple who takes her in, the Kinsellas, are kind and welcoming. Their treatment reflects back all the lack she receives at home. But their love is shadowed by a secret that reveals itself in time. Foster brilliantly examines quintessentially Irish themes of toxic masculinity, addiction, and over large families alongside loss, grief, and a strong tradition of silence. Ireland comes with a funny juxtaposition of silences and revelry which Foster subtly unpacks. This slender story abounds in symbolism, emotional exchange, and brilliant imagery. It leaves the reader, the Kinsellas, and the girl, at summer’s end, with plenty to consider. It is little book I encourage anyone interested in Ireland and/or brilliant efficient prose to pick up.
Reader, if you have yet to experience Claire Keegan’s uncanny ability to condense a story down to its most moving and compacted form, I encourage you to find your way to one (or all!) of her little books. They are a delight to hold (all of them measure around 5” x 7.5”) and a wild ride to read. Do not let the small nature of Keegan’s works delude you; these books embody the idiom: good things come in little packages.
Bibliography:
Keegan, Claire. Foster. Grove Press: 2022.
— So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men. Faber: 2023.
A Few Great Passages:
“Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without” (Foster).
“You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing” (Foster).
“She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is”(Foster).
“My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me ”(Foster).
“A taste of cut grass blew in, and every now and then a warm breeze played with the ivy on the ledge. When a shadow crossed, he looked out: a gulp of swallows skirmishing, high up, in camaraderie. Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human conflicts and the knowledge of how everything must end” (So Late).
