So Late in the Day: stories of women and men [sic on lower case]
By Claire Keegan
Grove Press, 2023, 118 pages
★★★★★
Some have hailed Claire Keegan as the greatest living Irish writer. I would not care to dispute it. So Late in the Day is three short stories that can be read in a quiet room in less than hour, but will stay with you for days. As the subtitle suggests, they feature the interactions between women and men, but they are merely the protagonists, not what the tales are about.
Irish fiction is often sad. The title tale is about Cathal, who does boring work that reflects his boring life. As he is about to go to his home in County Wicklow just south of Dublin, he realizes he forgot to save the financial document upon which he was working. Only a Polish cleaning lady that he dislikes is still around when he finally leaves. I reckon many of us have made such a careless mistake, but in Cathal’s case it’s indicative of a pattern. The story is really about how non-thinking carried into a relationship can be deadly. On the bus home he thinks of his almost-wife Sabine. Just a year earlier they were engaged, but his thoughtless disregard and inflexibility sent her packing back to Normandy. She also took his spirit with her and Cathal has now become the callous misogynist bloke he always hated.
In “The Long Painful Death,” Cynthia is lucky to be on Achill Island for a two-week writers’ retreat. She is staying in a home where the Nobel Prize-winning author Heinrich Böll once stayed, but she has a touch of writer’s block and has easily settled into the island’s slower pace. That is, until her lethargy is interrupted by an insistent German man who has been told he can see the house. First, he comes without notice when Cynthia isn’t ready, then he returns and criticizes her work habits. His arrogance is palpable but at least Cynthia knows how she will end her novel!
The concluding story, “Antarctica,” is the creepiest of the three. It involves a married woman with three kids who tells her family she is going Christmas shopping. In truth, she intends to trawl the city to find a man with whom she can have sex. She’s not unhappy in her marriage, she’s merely curious about what it would be like. She finds a guy who is a fantastic lover, but you certainly don’t need me to tell you about the potential dangers of having sex with a stranger.
If everyone could write short stories like Claire Keegan, I’d be a much bigger fan of the genre. I find far too many short stories either oblique or so obsessed with style that the narratives fail to spark. Keegan writes crisp prose that sharpens serious subjects such as anomie, fears of violence, and both physical and emotional isolation. In her worldview, a lack of consideration is a form of carelessness that yields unintended results on the tragedy scale. Her view of Irish men is pretty bleak and I suppose she could be accused of misandry. Or, you could call it turnabout is fair play. Your choice.
Rob Weir
Note: Achill Island is off the western coast of Ireland across from County Mayo. It has long been associated with writers and artists. The island is also associated with Grace O’Malley, a famous Irish female pirate. Confession: I have never read a word of Heinrich Böll.
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