Small Things Like These

Three stories by Claire Keegan (“So Late in the Day”, “The Long Painful Death”, “Antarctica”) came up in my short story reading group and absolutely blew everyone away. Keegan has an incredible gift with words, writing spare psychological stories with utter realism and an architectural sense of symbolic and structural unity. Small Things Like These keeps these talents moving for novella length.

Bill Furlong is a coal merchant in New Ross, Ireland, in 1985. A bastard, he never knew his father and his mother passed away when he was twelve. He was raised by the kindly Mrs. Wilson and has become a successful businessman and father, with five daughters. Times are bad and yet by dint of effort and discipline, the Furlongs cling to the middle-classes, respectable, and even somehow kind.

As Furlong ponders the upcoming Christmas season, his mind wanders across the past and his family. On a delivery to the local convent, he finds a freezing girl locked in an outbuilding. He begins to suspect the convent harbors a terrible truth, and that rather than helping unfortunate girls, it is a prison that exploits their labor. The entire town is complicit, looking aside because respectability is more important than kindness, and the barrier between their own lives and the abyss is so very very thin.

Furlong makes a brave choice, the right choice, and walks through snow into a cold and blinding future, left undefined. Simply a gorgeous novel.