The short-story writer 'can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought,' Flannery O'Connor wrote. 'When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.' By this metric, Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day, a collection of one novella and two short stories all exploring misogyny through the eyes of women who react to it and men who blister with it, is nothing short of a masterpiece. Through narratives of a canceled wedding, a writer’s interrupted residency and a woman’s dangerous infidelity with a stranger, Keegan’s delicate hand directs the reader away from obvious moralizing to the banality of bigotry.
The chasm between men and women is so vast in Claire Keegan’s story collection, So Late in the Day, that her characters might as well speak different languages. (In two of the three stories, they do.) Each of these tight, potent stories takes place over just a few hours, and each explores the fraught dynamics between two people, a man and a woman … Keegan’s stories are built around character rather than action, but they never flag. The tension builds almost imperceptibly until it is suddenly unbearable. As in her stunning, tiny novels, Foster and Small Things Like These, she has chosen her details carefully. Everything means something…Her details are so natural that readers might not immediately understand their significance. The stories grow richer with each read … All three stories pivot on a clash of expectations and desires, with women wanting independence and adventure and men expecting old-fashioned subservience and feeling baffled when they do not get it. That bafflement carries an ominous undercurrent; a threat of danger runs through each tale … they have new and powerful things to say about the ever-mystifying, ever-colliding worlds of contemporary Irish women and the men who stand in their way.
Spanning 25 years of Keegan’s career, they trace a current of violent chauvinism from the subtle to the overt. Together they give an image of men defined by sickly hunger, brittle pride, and a growing rage at the slow waning of their social and political power ... In this volume, male rage becomes more subtle as the stories go on, leaving the reader feeling as if they are burrowing through the muck from contemporary hate to its origins ... Each story balances somewhere between the frustration and fear of lonely men and the way their greed and hunger grow in the dark ... She pulls apart the strands of misogyny in individuals and institutions, diagnosing the same problem in both. She connects the violence of the past to that of the present, and domestic violence to state violence ... Throughout her career, Keegan seems to emphasize that we take nothing with us and that all that matters is what we give each other.
It's evident from the arrangement of this collection that Keegan's nuanced, suggestive style is one she's achieved over the years ... Magnificently simple, resonant.
Impressive ... A characteristically incisive, if somewhat meager, collection of three short stories that span the entirety of Keegan’s career. Both thematically and substantively, it reveals a different side of her writing than her two recent releases ... Keegan’s thrifty prose again yields concise, substantive, and spellbinding storytelling, but the mood is bleaker than her recent publications ... It’s wonderful to see one of today’s most astute writers tackle these topics, even if greedily I wish that she had done so via new stories.
...offers further confirmation of her spellbinding powers: the unpretentious language that feels forged in a hearth, the evocation of a pastoral but repressive Ireland, the characters whose predicaments remain lodged in your consciousness far longer than the epic battles of 1,000-page sagas ... What is perhaps most astonishing in reading the three stories together is that they don’t showcase Keegan’s maturation as a writer over more than two decades so much as remind you of how long she has simply been a master of the craft ... But you read Keegan, and are hypnotized by her, for the way she tends to her characters: as messy people rather than tidy concepts, brought to life in stories governed by an innate recognition that everything that rises to the level of the universal begins at the personal.
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 ... 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.
So this latest volume isn’t exactly new, but no matter: It is a delicious swoosh back in time, displaying Keegan’s career from its first stirrings to its full blossoming. We witness the gradual marbling of her realism with radicalism. Over the years, she doesn’t seem to have changed her mind about the shabby way the world treats women, but she has progressively made her point in a gentler and more devastating manner. I did not think realism could be truly feminist until I saw Keegan wield its techniques ... When realism is more revelatory of the world than reality itself, what can you do but feel grateful for Keegan’s mastery of it?
The author once takes a big issue and, with her characteristic quiet brilliance, illuminates it in a small homely setting ... Keegan's prose is translucently plain and simple. She works on a reader almost subliminally.
Keegan offers a master class in precisely crafted short fiction in this collection of three tales ... Keegan’s trenchant observations explode like bombshells, bringing menace and retribution to tales of romance delayed, denied, and even deadly.
Keegan’s prose is known for its quiet intensity and crystalline spareness. Last year, her novella Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; at just under 120 pages, it was the shortest book ever to make the list. So Late in the Day’s prose is equally exceptional. The Irish author paints scenes in a line or two and can convey a lifetime saturated in misogyny (and a newfound self-awareness of it) in a single internal reflection ... This complexity is one reason that Keegan’s short stories often have the weight of novels. Even her antagonists aren’t dummies. She can write flawed, disappointing characters without being condescending toward them or making them ridiculous ... Each story in So Late in the Day offers readers the suspense one might feel when walking home alone late at night. Violence lurks in Keegan’s stories, just as it does in our real world, despite it being so late in the story of women and men.
The stories’ premises evoke classic Hollywood — the end of an affair, a chance encounter, a passionate weekend — but Keegan twists expectations in ways not even Cary Grant could unravel ... Her fiction rewards re-reading, when her sentences can be savored for their precision — not the surgical incisiveness of Thomas Mann, but the compassionate minimalism of Anton Chekhov ... These are wee books, perfect for stocking stuffers, but they offer a generous vision. Each requires little more than an hour to read, but Keegan’s quirky people will stick with you long afterward.
In all three stories, however, Keegan precisely observes the subtle dynamics between men and women, be they strangers or romantic partners, and how those dynamics can shift and curdle with little warning. Compact but deep explorations of human vulnerability from a master of the form.
