Claire Keegan's 'Small Things Like These'

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Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see? (p.100).

This is the crucial question that the protagonist of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These asks himself near the end of the book, as he comes to terms with a personal revelation, on top of another, and very distressing, discovery. A few pages later he thinks of Mrs Wilson, a well-off Protestant woman who provided for his mother after she became pregnant with him (he was born on April 1, and some said the boy would turn out to be a fool): 

Of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life.

This book is just about that: the small things which amount to a life (to all our lives), the things about ourselves and others that we cannot, or will not, see.

Claire Keegan’s first book was Antarctica in 1999, and another collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, followed 8 years later. Then came that masterpiece, Foster, her long short story which first featured in the New Yorker and was published in book form in 2010, and which I have taught several times. We have had to wait 11 years for more. This time we certainly have a novel, though a very short one (110 well-spaced pages). 22 years from first book of fiction to first novel: a rarely travelled journey.

We are in the consciousness of Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant in County Wexford in the grim recessionary mid-1980s (not long after Foster, which is set in the countryside rather than a superbly-evoked New Ross - I too grew up in a small South-East community set along a river). Furlong is a provider - of fuel and of kindness. Like Mr Kinsella in Foster, he is a deeply sympathetic man, a caring father of five girls, an attentive husband, a hard-working and sensitive employer. Here is another positive portrait in a literature which often portrays fathers negatively (think for a start of Christy Mahon’s in The Playboy).  In Keegan’s words about Kinsella in Foster:

So many of the fathers in our literature are just awful and neglectful, especially when it comes to fathering a girl and one of the things I probably wanted to do is have a good Irish father in this story. I wanted him also to use his humour and his intelligence and energy with a girl, rather than fostering someone who is male.  I don’t think Kinsella was good to her because she was a girl. I just thought he was a decent man who enjoyed her company.

Despite his apparent security in life (but if you have something you are vulnerable to losing it), Furlong is beset by restlessness and anxiety (the strain of being alive, 53), an inescapable undercurrent which goes back to his own origins. There is a regular cadence: the ordinary part of him wished he’d never come near the place (59), Once more the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home (61), A part of him felt divided (84), A part of him considered … (107), Was it possible the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing? (108). A charged object in his life is the 500-piece jigsaw of a farm he asks for one boyhood Christmas (the alternative being his daddy), but he is disappointed, getting only a nailbrush, bar of soap, hot water bottle and a copy of A Christmas Carol (that story touches this one in many places):

He’d gone outside then, to the cow-house, to hide his disappointment, and cry. Neither Santa nor his father had come. And there was no jigsaw. He thought about the things children said about him in school, the name he was called, and understood this to be the reason. 20

Near the end of the story, decades later, he enters Mrs Stafford’s old shop just before Christmas and asks for the same present, but 

She said the only jigsaws they kept now were for children, that there was little demand for the more difficult ones anymore, then asked if she might help him find something.

Like a jigsaw, his life is fractured, and never securely whole. He is all too aware of its fragility, both financial and emotional, and how close everyone is to disaster. He is aware both of how fortunately his own life has turned out and of how it might have been different:

Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life, elsewhere, and wondered if this was not something in his blood; might his own father not have been one of those who had upped, suddenly, and taken the boat for England? It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

and

It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew. Although he did not venture far, he got around - and many an unfortunate he’d seen around town and out the country roads. The dole queues were getting longer and there were men out there who couldn’t pay their ESB bills, living in houses no warmer than bunkers, sleeping in their overcoats.

The rest of that paragraph lists examples of financial distress, and culminates in this image:

And early one morning, Furlong had seen a young schoolboy drinking the milk out of the cat’s bowl beyond the priest’s house.

Unlike other men, who fall asleep in front of the fire after post-Mass pints, he cannot relax on Sundays, and wants Mondays to come, so that he can lose himself in the mechanics of the ordinary, working week.

This is not a land of plenty (imagine the current pandemic hitting Ireland in 1985, and trying to save jobs and businesses). Furlong’s lorry will shortly need new tyres, and as a result Eileen’s longed-for replacement windows at the front of the house, to be financed by a loan, will have to wait. The barber’s son has just had a terminal diagnosis of cancer. Later in this December of crows Furlong

Came across a black cat eating from the carcass of a crow, licking her lips. (104)

All that makes the book sound very dark, but it is actually full of warmth, affection and decency, mediated through Furlong’s character, as in Foster, where the kindnesses of the Kinsellas are all the more impressive given their own personal tragedy. His family life is warmly evoked, particularly in their pre-Christmas rituals, and his relationship with his wife Eileen is brilliantly done in quick brush-strokes that some other novelists can only envy (Eileen has a sharper edge than her husband). 

The other pleasures of this book are manifold. Keegan’s prose is somehow simultaneously unshowy and carefully poetic: at times she reminds me of William Trevor in her tender attention to characters which goes straight to their heart. Sentence by sentence her writing is of the highest quality, and she moves through longer ones beautifully (look at the sentence at the top of page 25 starting Again, he found himself thinking back as it re-enacts Furlong’s thought processes). Peripheral characters flare vividly: the Mother Superior, Furlong’s daughters, Mrs Wilson. New Ross in the 80s is evoked superbly, a presence throughout the novel.

Underneath all is the shame of the Magdalene laundry scandal, to which the narrative eventually turns. By now this has been deeply explored in journalism, but Keegan approaches it slowly and obliquely, eventually folding it in with Furlong’s own story: the two strains come together in a moving conclusion. But this is not a novel ‘about’ that issue - indeed, Claire Keegan would firmly put right anyone who thinks that fiction should address ‘issues’. Nevertheless, the dedication at the start of the book alerts us in advance to the women and children who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries, followed on the next page by the irony of the extract from the 1916 Proclamation, which boasted of the cherishing of all of the children of the nation equally, a promise dismally unfulfilled in our history.

At one point Furlong stands in the dark outside the convent and looks down over New Ross:

For a time he stood listening and looking down at the town, at the smoke starting up from the chimneys and the small, diminishing stars in the sky. One of the brightest fell while he was standing there, leaving a streak like a chalk mark on a board for just a second before it vanished. Another seemed to burn out and slowly fade.

I think here of Malcolm in Act IV scene iii of Macbeth who says:

“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.

Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,

Yet Grace must still look so.”

The brightest was Lucifer/Satan (and thus Macbeth, the favoured thane), but Malcolm, in that scene set in the sunshine of England, which leads to the ending of the tyranny in Scotland, reminds us that there is still Grace in the world, and Furlong’s most personal discovery is his delayed understanding of (no spoiler) the act of daily grace by one particular person in his past.

It was Pascal (or Cicero, or Mark Twain or whoever) who wrote about a letter he had written:

I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter. 

It takes a lot of time and skill to write so concisely, and with such lucidity. Eleven years after Foster, Claire Keegan has given us a marvel of a story, one that within its ‘mere’ 110 pages somehow, and apparently effortlessly, carries a huge narrative, intellectual and emotional punch. 

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