George Saunders & Claire Keegan
George Saunders is not only a very fine short story writer, he is just about the best analyst around of how stories work. Top tip: sign up to his superb Story Club on Substack, in which he regularly analyses stories, and engages directly and generously with readers. His book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is essential reading for English teachers; in it, he looks at 7 stories by the Russian masters (Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev) with sensitive attention. He knows those stories as only someone who has taught them repeatedly over many years could do.
This post is on how the George Saunders-lens might be applied to Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (and you can hear him directly on Keegan’s work in his discussion with Deborah Treisman of her story ‘So Late in the Day’). This book is of course not a short story, but its tightness as a narrative still lends itself to that perspective, I think. For a classroom example with a shorter work, look at this on Hemingway’s short story ‘Cat in the Rain’.
The most important idea is ‘escalation’:
To our accruing list of universal laws of fiction (Be specific! Honor efficiency!), which, by the way, we should continually remind ourselves to distrust, we might add: Always be escalating. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.
and
A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time. We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arise ….We could understand a story as simply a series of … expectation/resolution moments.
Also, in as carefully-written a text as this, we should pay attention to his ‘Ruthless Efficiency Principle’:
the story form is ruthlessly efficient. Everything in a story should be to purpose. Our working assumption is that nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose.
This is a perfect description of Keegan’s writing in Small Things Like These: everything serves a function, it is full of subtle meaning, and is as tightly patterned as a poem. Apparently she went through 41 drafts.
So for Small Things Like These, what are those crucial moments of escalation, its ‘structural pulses’? These are moments which a teacher might draw out of pupils in class, and which reveal the substructure of the narrative (much in Keegan’s writing is below the surface). My page by page notes (see links at the bottom of this page) sometimes point to these, but there is no correct answer: if a pupil can find one of those pulses, and understand how it moves the story on in a ‘non-trivial way’, then that is an important element of understanding.
Some moments that might be examined:
It could be said that there are essentially no important narrative escalations in the first three sections of the book. There are many important things of course, but Claire Keegan keeps us waiting, and waiting. She describes Furlong’s life, the way he thinks, the life of New Ross leading up to Christmas and more, and we are aware that at some point there will be an escalation; we are holding our breath; the energy is building. Here is George Saunders:
We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy.
Section 4: it comes. The visit to the convent, which might have turned out to be just another routine delivery. But everything changes when he arrives at the chapel. On page 41 the girl with the roughly-cut hair comes to ask him for help. He ‘felt himself stepping back’, ironically, this will be the prompt for, eventually, him stepping forward to confront the situation, and at the end taking Sarah home with the steps they make through New Ross.
Another escalation: his discussion with Eileen in bed that night, pp 44-47 and her ‘cheap blow’ about his mother: she has sensed the danger of change in him. There has been a shift in their relationship.
50: his concern about the men sexually harassing Kathleen, which she brushes off. Something has certainly changed inside him.
53-56: the encounter with the young woman as he asks for a kettle to thaw the yard’s lock. His previous self has been discomposed: he imagines another life. He is carrying this energy forward now.
59: the return to the convent, and finding the girl in the coal shed, her excrement on the floor. Reluctant though he is, he cannot ignore this.
62: a big escalation. He finds out the girl has a baby boy, just 14 weeks old. Now this is personal for Furlong, the parallel with his own (more fortunate) life impossible to avoid.
(Saunders): The preferred, most efficient, highest-order form of energy transfer (the premier way for a scene to advance the story in a non-trivial way) is for a beat to cause the next beat, especially if that next beat is felt as essential, i.e., as an escalation: a meaningful alteration in the terms of the story.
The following pages show the Mother Superior manipulating and trying to control him, at first successfully. This could be the end of the story. But on p.69 another change: his ‘contrariness’ means he stays, with a ‘queer, new power’, and although he accepts the bribe of money he delays his exit to talk to the girl.
71. Another step on his journey: he finds out that this girl and his mother are both called Sarah. In class: what do you expect to happen now? (and in retrospect, what is his point of no return? After what moment must he act?).
In the following pages, there is little action: the family go to Mass, they continue the Christmas preparations. Again, we are waiting: so is he. What is happening inside him?
85. His attempted visit to Ned (who is in a convalescent home). A crucial escalation: the woman who points out the family resemblance. 86: his half-hour mulling over this, ‘letting it stoke his mind.’ In class: what is the connection between this moment and his thoughts about the girl in the last paragraph of Section 6?
93+ the conversation with Mrs Kehoe, and another point where the story might come to a halt (the road not taken): her warnings about not tangling with the Church. Look at 95: he politely declines to accept what she is saying. So a ‘fundamental change’ has happened within him?
(Saunders) What is escalation, anyway? How does a story produce the illusion of escalation? (Or, as a writer might ask it: “How can I get this stupid thing to escalate?”) One answer: refuse to repeat beats. Once a story has moved forward, through some fundamental change in the character’s condition, we don’t get to enact that change again.
His walk through New Ross: on 99 he has come to terms with Ned as his father, and admires his ‘act of daily grace’. So will he also do what a ‘father’ should?
Imagine ending the story at this point. Saunders: Experimentally truncate a good story before the point where its creator actually ended it. Just cut it off and observe your reaction to that imposed ending. The resulting feeling will tell us something about what’s missing. Or, conversely, about what the remaining text does supply, once we read it, that completes the transformation from “narrative” to “story.”
The final pages act out inevitably. Ask in class: at what point did this become inevitable, the only path Furlong could take?
(Saunders). We might think of structure as simply: an organisational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.
Saunders again on endings. What do we imagine happening beyond the completion of this novel?
One feature of a beautifully ended story is that we can imagine the lives of the characters continuing on beyond it.
And he also gets the final word:
We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial. That’s it.
More:
I will be giving a free webinar on the book for English teachers on the evening of Tuesday 10th September 2024: register.
Also in this series: