Books |
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
By
Published: Feb 08, 2022
Category:
Fiction
The novel ends abruptly… on page 128. A full stop in mid-stride. This is not laziness or an unfortunate editorial decision. It’s because what happens next is for you to think about. And, guaranteed, you will think about it.
Who is Claire Keegan? A few years ago, this Irish writer won the Davy Byrnes Award — then the world’s richest prize for a story — for Foster, which The Times UK put on its list of the top 50 novels of the 21st century. You think “Small Things Like These” is short? “Foster” is just 96 pages.
“Small Things Like These” is, like “Foster,” set in Ireland. It’s 1985, and although there are cars and British TV shows, life in the coastal town of New Ross feels more like the 1800s. The townspeople work in shipyards, they make fruitcakes, they use an 18th century constipation remedy called Beechams Powder. The writing is terse, atmospheric — you can see this town. And although there seems to be nothing happening, you read the book like a thriller, non-stop. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Bill Furlong is lucky, and he knows it. His mother was poor, he never knew his father, but a rich widow took him in, pointed him toward an education, gave him a little money. Now he’s married. His five daughters are the pride of his life.
Furlong has a good business — in a town that is often uncomfortably cold, he sells coal and timber. Christmas is coming. Customers are giving him bigger orders. He’s making deliveries seven days a week. “I’m just a bit weary, is all,” he tells his wife. “Pay no heed.”
It’s not that simple. He’s worried by the economic distress he sees all around him: “It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything.”
And he’s worried about something bigger: “Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.”
How to deal with that worry? Suppress it: “Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls.”
Among his customers: the convent of the Good Shepherd, where the nuns run a laundry service for the town’s restaurants, priests, and the prosperous, with unfortunate girls working in the laundry service. There are rumors about the convent.They’re mostly ignored — who knows about the truth of anything in a small town where gossip is a major hobby?
One morning, as Furlong is making a delivery and… let’s just say that he learns something. Can he ignore it? Or does he need to do something? (Veteran Butler readers may recognize Furlong’s dilemma. It’s the same one in another story I reviewed. Remember it?)
Here’s the ending of the Washington Post review: “Get two copies: one to keep, one to give.” I totally agree.
(Many thanks, MM)
