A friend recently sent me a copy of The News from Dublin, the latest short-story collection from the award-winning Irish writer Colm Tόibín, which I read with great interest. It inspired me to go back to another Irish writer’s collection of short stories which I’ve possessed for some time: Claire Keegan’s Antarctica. Tόibín and Keegan have more than their Irishness in common. They both deftly control the English language. They both, coincidentally enough, set some of their stories in Ireland (no surprise) and some in the United States (surprise, at least to me). And they both like to deliver the subtle epiphany at the end. Of the two, Tόibín is the more prolific. He’s written plays, novels, poetry, and nonfiction in an oeuvre that expands over more than two dozen books, while Keegan is renowned and revered for a comparatively scant series of short stories and novellas, two of which I have written about before in this blog. Antarctica was Keegan’s first collection of stories, while Tόibín published The News from Dublin as the latest in his hefty body of work, so it may appear that I am unfairly contrasting the young Keegan with the well established Tόibín. But, having completed both sets of stories, I must say that Keegan edged out Tόibín to deliver more than one devastating conclusion. I found Tόibín to be perhaps a bit too subtle—I realize that I am publicly confessing to be a philistine here; surely this great writer doesn’t need my endorsement to enjoy a lifetime of earned success—when too often the end of his stories evoked at most a “huh.” Keegan didn’t always floor me, but more often than not I finished her tales with a gasp.
One of Tόibín’s stories that elicited more than a “huh” for me was “A Sum of Money,” about a boy who observes his father using a wire to open the family cash-box after his mother had lost the key. At his boarding school the boy applies the same lock-picking technique to steal from his fellow students. The story resonates with me of because of my background of working at a boarding school where theft on a dormitory is one of the most unsettling offenses in a community based on open doors and trust. When the boy gets caught and sent home, his parents are “embarrassed,” and “don’t know what to say.” The heartbreaking final image is that of the boy returning to his room to change into dry clothes—his father has forced him to walk from the gate to their farmhouse in a downpour—and leaving the door open for his parents to come and speak to him. The final line is chilling: “He would close the door only when he was sure they had gone to bed.” The final story in the collection, “The Catalan Girls,” is the length of a novella and traces the lives of three sisters from childhood to old age. It’s an ambitious, cynical meditation on the delicate and vulnerable bonds among siblings, and it caps a collection of sad glimpses into characters searching for some kind of reassuring connection with others.
Claire Keegan also writes of siblings in her eponymous “Sisters,” but her story stretches over weeks, not years, and delivers a satisfying comeuppance with one snip of the scissors. Keegan can be pleasingly mordant, as in “Love in the Tall Grass,” in which a long-anticipated twosome becomes an unexpected and awkward threesome. She can be empathic, as in “Close to the Water’s Edge,” in which a closeted young Harvard student is tormented almost to the point of suicide by a cruel, boorish, wealthy stepfather, only to find the courage to reset and keep living. One of the most impressive (and comedic) of her tales is “Ride if You Dare,” which takes place in the American South and captures American idiom perfectly. The story sounds less like the work of an Irish woman and more like something by Larry Brown or Cormac McCarthy:
The waitress comes over and takes a pencil from behind her ear. “You folks ready?” She keeps her eyes on the cowboy hat as she takes their orders. It’s a great big hat with a Saints button pinned into the band. Raw oysters with dirty rice and another Bud for the cowboy. Boiled crawfish for the lady, and scotch, straight up.
“You ain’t driving?” he asks.
“No. I got here on a white mule.”
“The lady has a sense of humor. I like that.”
“Glad you approve.”
But of Keegan’s many gifts, the finest is her sense of an ending. To avoid spoiling her payoffs, I will offer only one example, from the title story, about a woman who comes to the city looking for a chance to have an affair with a complete stranger. She accomplishes her mission, but she ends up confined in a room, abandoned, naked, handcuffed, and gagged. Her captor has left open the window, through which a chilly breeze enters. Here are the last two sentences: “She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then of eternity.” A less confident writer might have gone on to clarify that the woman realizes that her life has changed permanently and that she’s never going to escape, but Keegan knows exactly when to shut up.