San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Three Irish stories are short but substantive
Reading Irish-born Claire Keegan is like succumbing to a drug: eerie, hallucinogenic, time-stopping. Her simplest sentences envelop the brain (and all the senses) in a deep, fully dimensional dream.
The prize-winning Keegan may now be best known to Americans by the acclaimed film version of her story “Foster” (released in the Irish language as “The Quiet Girl”) or by her last novel, “Small Things Like These,” shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022.
“So Late in the Day,” an alarmingly slender new volume of three stories (each of which appeared elsewhere earlier) compensates for its brevity with power. Caution dictates it be ingested slowly. Each story is as substantive as a novel, and as breathtaking.
The beguiling music of Keegan’s prose generates a force field of inevitability. Consider her title story’s first paragraph in which Cathal, a youngish man, is at the open window in his Dublin office on a pretty day: “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 upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.”
Cathal’s pending marriage has apparently, at the last minute, been canceled. We first meet attractive, alert Sabine when Cathal, sitting behind her in a conference, “looked at the little buttons on the back of her blouse, wondering if she’d fastened them through the loops by herself.” He’ll manage to woo her, but enough of his crass, self-serving essence will leak into their courtship to incite its doom.
What’s most amazing about this stately, even silken recital is that we readers dwell the whole time in Cathal’s head. As we listen to his thinking (“he would not have minded her shutting up right then, and giving him what he wanted”) and glimpse his upbringing — an early dinner table scene wherein he, his brother and their father laugh at a cruel prank on his mother — we grasp what has shaped him. Yet while comprehending Cathal’s blinkered character, we also feel his almost-awareness of what he is, and what he has done.
“A Long and Painful Death” finds a young writer arriving at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island, in Ireland, to undertake an artistic residency. Keegan so brilliantly describes the landscape, cottage and sublime anticipation of solitary time and workspace, it will
“So Late in the Day,” an alarmingly slender new volume of three stories (each of which appeared elsewhere earlier) compensates for
its brevity with power.
make writers reading this story ache with desire. “She … boiled the kettle for tea, lit a small fire with turf from the basket … happily she turned out the light knowing that tomorrow would be hers, to work and read and walk along the roads to the shore.”
When a strange German professor shows up unannounced, what transpires is puzzling, enraging, funny and finally, complicatingly real. Like all of these stories’ endings, this one is wondrous for its precision.
The final tale, “Antarctica,” may transcend Keegan’s prior triumphs, but it’s not for the fainthearted: “Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man.” Keegan’s calm, quiet narrative moves smoothly — embedding tiny hints, like needles, of what’s to come. Taking a first-class train carriage into the city for Christmas shopping, the woman then dresses up and finds a pub: “a converted prison with barred windows.”
Ooookay. She meets a man, pleasant and unconditional in his interest, and floods of alcohol facilitate their seemingly blissful sex. “They battled against their lust, wrestled against what in the end carried them away.” And later, he kisses her “as if there was something in her mouth he wanted.”
I’d ruin it to say more. But what follows, if not precisely unexpected, will shock. This story’s wake almost wafts a faint, burning scent. Its impact — like that of the entire collection — is unforgettable.