Claire Keegan's 'So Late in the Day'

For a long time I have thought that Claire Keegan is one of the very best writers at work in Ireland today. For a long time she went slightly below the major publicity radar, though her exquisite long short story ‘Foster’, first published in the New Yorker in 2010, steadily gathered more notice; selected as a Leaving Certificate option in English, it has been, as the author has said ‘very good to me’. Read her comments at my school on that story.

The last two years have shown that Keegan is certainly now a ‘big name’. First came the short (first) novel Small Things Like These, my Book of 2021 (and being made into a film featuring Cillian Murphy), and now also one of the Leaving Certificate options in the Comparative section. Then the beautifully-achieved cinematic adaptation of ‘Foster’, An Cailín Ciúin | The Quiet Girl, became one of the most successful ever Irish films. And now her short story ‘So Late in the Day’ is about to be published as a standalone book of just 64 pages. It first appeared in the New Yorker in February 2022.

‘Foster’ and Small Things present at their centre good men. In Keegan’s words about the former,

They say that there are very few good Irish men in literature, good Irish fathers. So many of the fathers in our literature are just awful and neglectful, especially when it comes to fathering a girl and one on the things I probably wanted to do is have a good Irish father in this story.

But the central character of ‘So Late in the Day’ is awful. Cathal’s awfulness compels us, as if we cannot escape from him, a compulsion that drives this narrative: Keegan keeps hold of us as the full quality of his failures as a man and a human being are revealed.

There is no point in saying any more, since the great George Saunders has already turned his attention to the story, and you can hear/read what he has said below. In his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and in his superb Substack Story Club, Saunders has shown how wonderfully attentive he is to the ways stories move: there is no better guide today. So just read the story first, or listen to Claire Keegan reading it for you, and then sit back and enjoy Saunders’s conversation with Deborah Treisman (which includes the author’s reading), and don’t miss Keegan’s own comments to Treisman.

More from me on Keegan via the links below.

And added 18.10.23: this interview with Sean Rocks on Arena at the launch of ‘So Late’ is the best interview I have heard with the author.

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