By Claire Keegan
- Pub Date: 2023
- Where I bought this book: Athena Books, Greenwich, Conn.
- Why I bought this book: Long known in her native Ireland, Keegan's books are now being published in the United States. And that is good.
It was the perfect phrase for a tedious experience. And that is Keegan's strength. She can take the mundane, and with some well-chosen words, turn reading about it into one of life's pleasures.
Whether it's riding a bus, making coffee, even going to the bathroom, Keegan nails it. I am still enamored of her ability to turn a chicken crossing the road into a work of art.
The setting is a woman taking a drive in the country.
On the edge of the road, a small, plump hen walked purposefully along, her head extended and her feet clambering over the stones. She was a pretty hen, her plumage edged in white, as though she'd powdered herself before she'd stepped out of the house. She hopped down onto the grassy verge and, without looking left or right, raced across the road, then stopped, re-adjusted her wings, and made a clear line for the cliff. The woman watched how the hen kept her head down when she reached the edge and how, without a moment's hesitation, she jumped over it. The woman stopped the car and walked to the spot from which the hen had flung herself. A part of her did not want to look over the cliff -- but when she did she there saw the hen with several others, scratching or lying contentedly in a pit of sand on a grassy ledge not far below.
That single paragraph does what all writers strive for: showing, not telling, using simple but compelling language, making the ordinary become extraordinary. It was an aside to the actually story, a contextual anomaly, yet it has stuck with me.
But later thinking about the snippet, I considered how, with her skillful use of pronouns, she mingled the hen's experience with one the woman was about to have.
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These are three tiny tales of women and men, about their failures at connecting with each other. The women, but mostly the men, talk not to each other, but at each other. In her language and descriptions, Keegan gives the stories a feminist twist.
In the title story, she tells of a young couple's broken engagement -- on the day of their wedding -- from the groom's perspective. Instead of being sympathetic, Keegan portrays him as a mess -- bitter, thoughtless, incompetent. But it's not a harsh account. She simply does so by showing Cathal's thoughts, words, and actions before and during the courtship.
The Long and Painful Death is told from the view of a woman who stays at a writer's house to be inspired by his work. Instead, she is interrupted by an expert on the house she is renting, who is so interested in his own knowledge that he is obtuse to her disinterest in him. It's a clever, subtle take on mansplaining.
Antarctica deals with a woman seeking to have an affair on a holiday weekend away from her family. (No spoiler here, the opening line of the story is "Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out.") Although it's another example of her exquisite writing, the story borders on being creepy. It is the reason the book failed to gain a full 10 out of 10 stars in my review.
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