At the opening of Small Things Like These, one immediately senses that Keegan is breathing something vital into the season’s most cherished tales, until, as gently as snow falling, her little book accrues the unmistakable aura of a classic ... Keegan’s Everyman hero is Bill Furlong, whose past and present she sketches with such crisp efficiency that the brush marks of her artistry are almost invisible ... From the elements of this simple existence in an inconsequential town, Keegan has carved out a profoundly moving and universal story. There’s nothing preachy here, just the strange joy and anxiety of firmly resisting cruelty ... Grand gestures, extravagant generosity, moments of surprising forgiveness all have their rightful place in our holiday legends. But Small Things Like These reminds us that the real miracle in any season is courage ... Get two copies: one to keep, one to give.
Some may be disappointed to discover that Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan’s first novel in more than a decade, is a mere 114 pages long. However, Keegan has never been a writer to waste a word ... An evocative tale of Ireland ... Keegan is clever to funnel the novel’s perspective through Furlong ... The novel isn’t just an eloquent attack on these laundries, however. It is also a touching Christmas tale, genuinely reminiscent of the festive stories of O Henry and Charles Dickens; a novel that has been seeped in sherry and served by the fireside ... As soon as you pick the novel up, it’s all over. The monumental power of Claire Keegan is that she can create these cuckoo-clock narratives where every single word seems to be a necessary contribution to the overall mechanism of the novel. She is all killer, no filler ... Small Things Like These is another minor miracle from Keegan, a book that is nostalgic, touching, brutal and angry. All of which is to say, it is utterly unmissable.
Keegan may be telling a fictional story, but the complicit silence of an ordinary individual faced with a corrupt institution is an authentic scenario, particularly for those living in Ireland during the operation of Magdalene laundries ... Keegan’s decision to portray the horrors of a Magdalene laundry through the exterior lens of an unassuming male character, rather than fictionalizing first-hand experiences, is a clever device which avoids shock value and instead questions how the morality of the everyman is shaped by culture ... a slim yet evocative book that honors the small things that make a difference while also showing that communities determine which traditions to celebrate or reform, to uphold or rewrite.
This small, exquisite book leaves a large impression ... Keegan knows how to weigh and pace her sentences, and her fine judgement delivers many subtle pleasures ... Keegan fully exploits the power of understatement. Most of the big events either take place offstage or happened in the past, and if strong emotion is unavoidable, she displaces it with a verisimilitude in keeping with her characters ... Keegan’s restraint in such moments has an amplifying effect ... The climax of Small Things Like These is deeply moving ... Masterpiece.
... exquisite ... In very little space, Keegan distills the texture of village life during Ireland’s devastating 1980s recession. While the novella is a sharp critique of Catholic institutions, it’s also a bold examination of Christian charity ... Keegan’s precisely considered details about character, setting, memory, and dramatic moment create a story you will want to read again and again. Her deceptively simple language is pitch-perfect ... Keegan’s music is well suited to this season in a world where too often self-interest overshadows compassion.
While Keegan dedicates Small Things Like These to 'the women and children who suffered time in Ireland's Magdalen laundries'...her compact, crystallized narrative does not train its gaze on these victims or the nuns who imprisoned them within high walls 'topped with broken glass,' but instead on Bill Furlong and his harrowing quest for meaning ...
Small Things Like These can be read as a feminist revision of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol—to which the novel explicitly alludes. While Dickens uses his story to challenge the unequal distribution of wealth in Victorian society, his message nevertheless reinforces patriarchal values by celebrating the male-centric and materialist aspects of Christmas, rather than its spiritual elements ... Overall, Keegan's exquisitely ambiguous finale shows that narratives about at-risk young women are not confined by fiction or time.
Claire Keegan...gives us her best work yet ... a short, wrenching, thoroughly brilliant novel mapping the path of one man's conscience, its torment and vacillation between two courses of action ... Keegan casts the movement of Furlong's thoughts amid the goodness of home, the life of the town, and the reality of the convent's prestige, prosperity and menacing power. She slips in little details that hint ineffably at great import. Subtle reverberations and stray observations mark Furlong's journey toward a never certain decision. Spare and potent, this is a remarkable story about a terrible crime and a riven conscience.
Reading the story I felt immersed in a 19th-century landscape, rather than one set in the years of my own teens...Such homey quaintification of Irishness is a fairly familiar trope, but here it’s likely accurate enough: The country was still sunk in the past in 1985, when a doctor’s prescription was required to buy condoms. And Keegan’s prose, as she describes this trapped-in-amber world, is both nostalgic and practical: The scope of village life may be small, but its texture is rich...Moments of interpersonal contact shimmer like the dimming jewels of a sense of community that, for many of us, has vanished into bygones ... Curiously, by casting Furlong as a reluctant but good-hearted hero and the women around him as largely enablers and cowards — protective of their own children but otherwise seeing no evil — Keegan almost seems to suggest that in this community it was the women who were most keenly implicated in perpetuating the suffering of their own. Not only the nuns themselves, but the gossips and bystanders and repressed and fearful bourgeoisies like Eileen, who knew of the crimes and stubbornly turned their faces away ... As in Ursula K. Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, this Ireland is a place whose cheeriness depends on the misery of its scapegoats.
... this exquisite miniature of a novel somehow defies the gravitational pull of its grim subject to hover in a quotidian, luminous present. Details materialize with preternatural clarity. The milky light of a winter afternoon, mist on a river, a woman opening an oven door, a child taking her father’s hand: We see these things and feel their lingering presence as we are drawn into the life of an unassuming man in an unremarkable place ... Ms. Keegan is a master of the seemingly casual brushstroke that on this small canvas illuminates a character or a history with piercing accuracy ... Ms. Keegan’s control never falters ... Rich in sly humor and wry compassion, the world encompassed by Small Things Like These is one traversed by generations of Irish writers, from Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin, William Trevor and Edna O’Brien, to contemporary novelists such as Donal Ryan, Sebastian Barry and Colm Tóibín ... Ms. Keegan is leading us, then, down a well-worn path, yet one that we see, through Bill Furlong’s eyes, as though for the first time.
Poignant ... Keegan has a keen ear for dialect without letting it overwhelm conversations ... Keegan has condensed a colossal piece of humanist fiction into a tiny volume. Hugely affecting, the story of Bill Furlong will remain with readers long after they close the book: he represents everyone whose kindness outlasts their presence.
Elegiac ... But this is first and foremost a story rather than a polemic. Its power lies in its simplicity—it almost reads like a fable, consciously laced with nativity references ... A tender, condensed and pitch-perfect tale. As soon as I reached the end, I returned to the beginning to read it again.
Small Things Like These brings a fresh and sensitive perspective to an awful period in our collective history. Detailed, insightful and written with striking economy of language, it gets the reader remarkably close to the experience of the character, recalling Faulkner’s line about the best fiction being truer than fact ... Set over a short time span – the busy weeks in the lead up to Christmas – with a linear narrative, the book opens big, like a 19th-century novel, inviting the reader into the world before tapering off to smaller, memorable details ... The depiction of the town and townspeople is equally deft ... Keegan captures a particular time and place, while also setting out the stakes ... In Small Things Like These there are echoes of other great Irish writers ... To say that this new novel is long awaited is an understatement. To say that it doesn’t disappoint is another. Small Things Like These is a timely and powerful book that asks a deceptively simple question: 'Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?'
... powerful ... Keegan’s first novel enters the world this month with the shocking force of a debut. With its main text running to just 70 pages, it might have been deemed a novella, but it earns the greater designation. Keegan, whose short stories contain unusual depth and grandeur, is the only contemporary writer who could manage the feat of a completely imagined, structured and sustained world with such brevity ...As Keegan’s concise, capacious new book demonstrates, little acts can lead to real change.
... a gem ... Context in advance or at the end, it's still a deeply moving tale ... Keegan's economy of prose is a marvel ... The book takes just an hour or so to read, but you still feel like you know Bill Furlong by the end and understand why he does what he does. His tale of quiet heroism doesn't require any more words.
... in 110 deceptively effortless pages, she takes the national scandal of the Magdalene laundries and tells it so quietly you scarcely want to breathe. It is the quietness of the telling that makes the cruelty so stark; the ordinariness of the community she portrays that makes its complicity so hard to bear ... Keegan is the goddess of small things. Her ability to conjure whole worlds from a few words; an entire relationship from a handful of exchanges, is little short of miraculous. The chapter in which the Furlongs prepare for Christmas is a pure joy ... The genius is in the precision of the writing; in the details, and how Keegan makes each one count ... what the reader is left with is less a searing indictment of a national outrage than an affirmation of human decency. Small Things Like These assures us we are all capable of doing the right thing, and that goodness, like misery, can be handed on from man to man. It is a literary state of grace.
The narrative gains its emotional resonance from the dynamics between characters ... Plunge pool-like, the narrative implies significant depth below its close, bounded surface ... Keegan pushes the violence back into the margins. The awful things that disturb her characters’ lives are only hinted at, having transpired some time before the present, or in the previous generation. It makes the stories more substantial and elemental ... Keegan provides [Bill] with a complex, nuanced inner life ... Why, then, does Small Things Like These not feel quite as devastating, as lasting, as Keegan’s previous work? Perhaps, for the first time in her writing, the lightness here has become too light – is kept too far away from the darkness that lurks at the other side of the town.
... as small as all the elements of the physical book are, the novel packs a terrible gut punch that readers won’t soon forget ... Keegan, a short story writer, does not waste a single word in presenting the fears and shame of this reality through the discovery of a country gentleman who would never expect to be caught up in such a tumultuous and depraved situation. Naturally, a story like this might be more intensely executed through the heart and soul of a woman who had similar experiences or through the eyes of a nun who thought she was only doing what her faith expected of her. By making the protagonist a man who discovers just one of the many victims of this ill-conceived system, Keegan ensures that the story will find a larger audience for its unsettling contents. And perhaps, since the church is run by white men in the Irish state, it is more impactful that a man find out the ugly truth ... There is an appreciated level of anger in the way that Keegan tells her story. She wastes no time in helping Bill Furlong understand the dangerous situation that he has happened upon. It is an emotionally quiet but powerful tale that uses brevity to draw us in and give us access to the most feeling part of our empathetic selves. Politically, it is not a parable but a seasoned piece of fiction that exemplifies the tone of injustice in a compelling manner ... small in everything but its enraged heart. It is a novel for these ages as the veils of vaunted institutions like the church peel to onion skin thinness. We see the Wizard behind the curtain, and it is yet another clarion call for change through the power of artfully told stories.
Keegan’s languid and crystalline prose is surprisingly powerful, poetically describing a Thatcher-era Dickensian village of financially struggling citizens preparing for the holiday while hinting at grim secrets just below the surface ... Keegan deftly reveals the pernicious complicity behind Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and their part in Ireland’s tragic history of the abuse of young women by the church. Keegan’s psychologically astute characterizations subtly convey the dual pressures of culpability and fear felt by the faithful ... A trenchant and plangent work asking at what cost does one remain silent.
Keegan indicts the social culture that enabled Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and brilliantly articulates a decent person’s struggle of conscience ... Keegan’s beautiful prose is quiet and precise, jewel-like in its clarity. Highly recommended.
Gorgeously textured ... Keegan beautifully conveys Bill’s interior life ... It all leads to a bittersweet culmination, a sort of anti–Christmas Carol, but to Bill it’s simply sweet. Readers will be touched.
Compact and gripping ... Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it ... A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
