★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Claire Keegan is fast becoming my favorite living author. This latest book features three short stories, though just the title story is new. The others were reprinted from her earlier two collections of short stories (Antarctica and Walk The Blue Fields, both of which I now have on order).
A theme connects these stories, as hinted by the book’s subtitle: “Stories of Women and Men.” Indeed, each story depicts an unhappy encounter between the sexes with unsettling consequences.
My favorite was So Late in the Day, where a man reflects on his sad life on what should have been his wedding day. He treated his fiancée horribly, but can’t seem to accept responsibility for his deplorable behavior once she broke off the engagement. A flashback to a breakfast with his family when he returned home from college will haunt me for a long time.
An autobiographical thread runs through The Long and Painful Death, where a writer’s idyllic residency at a renowned seaside cottage is disrupted by a crazed and misogynistic academic.
Antarctica is the shortest and bleakest story of the collection. Tension builds throughout its few pages to a devastating end.
Ordinarily, any Claire Keegan book garners an automatic five-star rating from me. In this case, I knocked off one star because this one offered just a single story that hadn’t already been published. If I had known this, I would have read the new story online with my New Yorker subscription and purchased her two short-story collections instead.
Highlights
Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.
She watched the clock on the bedside table, the red numbers changing. The cat was watching her, his eyes dark as apple seeds. She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then eternity.