Harnessing the power of brevity
Keegan has towering reputation despite not writing much or publishing often
Claire Keegan didn’t read much as a child. In her home in southeast Ireland, where her family ran a sheep, pig and cattle farm, there were just a couple of books around the house — an illustrated edition of the Bible and a cookbook, she recalls.
“I’m not sure that growing up without books was a bad thing, because I had to use my imagination,” she said. “Otherwise I might have just stuck my head in a book.”
As it turned out, Keegan made a career out of her imagination.
Despite her sparse output — she has released just four books over two decades — Keegan has gained a towering reputation as one of Ireland’s canonical writers. Her work is a staple on school curricula and has won a slew of prizes and a passionate following among independent booksellers. Prominent novelists such as Colm Toibin, Lily King, David Mitchell and Richard Ford have lauded her work with an admiration that borders on reverence.
“She’s so utterly in control,” said Douglas Stuart, the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “Shuggie Bain.” “She can say so much, and be so loud, with very little.”
This year, her 2021 novella, “Small Things Like These,” about an Irish coal merchant who discovers a disheveled, barefoot girl locked in the coal shed of a Catholic convent, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and praised by judges for its “beautiful, clear, economic writing.” At 114 pages, it is the shortest book to be recognized in the prize’s history.
Now one of her earlier works, “Foster,” which was released as a short story more than a decade ago, was recently published in the U.S. as a stand-alone book for the first time. Set in rural Ireland in the early 1980s, it unfolds from the perspective of a young girl who is sent away for the summer to live with a foster family while her mother struggles to care for a newborn and the girl’s many siblings. Writing in The New York Times, novelist Alex Gilvarry called it “a master class in child narration” and argued that “Foster” is as rich and emotionally resonant as a “heaping 400-page tome.”
“She is able to tell a story in a paragraph, or to compress a novel into a few thousand words,” said Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at the New Yorker, which published an abridged version of “Foster” in 2010. “There’s such a precision to what she notices.”
It’s rare for a writer to build such a lofty reputation from short fiction alone. Keegan has been rated among the form’s most masterful practitioners — drawing comparisons to Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, William Trevor and Anton Chekhov, one of her heroes.
Keegan’s stories often hinge on the unspoken tensions that fester between neighbors, parents and children, husbands and wives — even as they probe the bigger political and social fault lines in Irish society.
“Small Things Like These” examines the moral corrosion that spreads into towns and villages where Catholic nunneries ran Magdalene Laundries, institutions where pregnant and unwed women and girls were forced to perform menial labor and were separated from their babies, many of who died. Keegan explores that dark thread in an oblique way, through the eyes of a merchant, who has daughters at home and is shaken when he discovers that nuns are abusing girls in their care.
Similarly, “Foster” probes the social side effects of Ireland’s former strict prohibitions on contraception and abortion, from the perspective of a girl who is taken in for a summer by a childless couple and feels loved for the first time, a feeling that forces the realization that she’s unwanted at home.
Keegan was born in 1968, the youngest of six. She left home at age 17 to attend Loyola University in New Orleans, where she studied political science and English. When she returned to Ireland in the early 1990s, the country was in the grip of an economic crisis and jobs were scarce. She applied for 300 jobs, she said, and was turned down.
She tried writing a story after her mother saw an ad for a short fiction competition on television. Unemployed and in her early 20s, Keegan submitted a story and immediately had it published. She later found a part-time teaching job in Dublin and continued writing on the side.
Her first story collection, “Antarctica,” released in 1999, won the Rooney prize for Irish literature. It was published in the United States in 2001 by an imprint of Grove Atlantic, and drew broad praise from critics.
It took her nearly a decade to produce a second book of stories, titled “Walk the Blue Fields,” which was met with equally rapturous reviews. Writing for the Times in 2008, critic Maud Newton lauded the stories as “so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it’s easy to imagine readers savoring them many years from now.”
“Foster,” which Keegan classifies as a long short story, took a strange and circuitous path to publication. It was released in abridged form in the New Yorker in 2010, and was published later that year at its original length in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber. Keegan’s editors at Grove hesitated to release it as a stand-alone work on the heels of the New Yorker, and decided to wait for her next book. It took another 12 years for the arrival of “Small Things Like These.” When Grove released it last fall, it had been 14 years since Keegan had published a book in the United States.
“There was a whole generation and a half of booksellers who didn’t know her,” said Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove Atlantic. “She’s sort of a stone cutter, Claire. She doesn’t work quickly.”
Keegan says her work is often described as pared down, when in fact, she writes stories as they come to her, without giving a thought to length.
“What pleases me,” Keegan said, “is brevity.”