The Merciless Gifting of Claire Keegan
In conversation with a neighbour last summer that took a literary turn, I became aware with some embarrassment of something that I never thought could happen to me: Since the birth of my daughter 4 years ago, I had pretty much stopped reading fiction. An obsessive reader since childhood, I would not have believed it was even possible to go without a novel for that long. But the physical immediacy of being a new mother eclipsed all else for me. In the throes of the baby stage, I could hardly manage to recall what a novel was, let alone to read one. And by the time I emerged from the toddlerhood tunnel, I was out of the habit - as well as out of the loop. Suddenly, I had no idea what to read, where to begin. I had also discovered that my tastes had changed from where I’d left off. When I tried to read some of my previous favourites, I could not stomach them. Too convoluted, too brooding, too sentimental.
I expressed all of this to the owner of a small independent bookshop on a visit to Belfast one day. And without hesitation, the woman handed me Antarctica, a collection of short stories by the Irish writer Claire Keegan.
That very night, I prepared to lose myself in the book, as if anticipating a warm bubble bath.
The eponymous opening story in Antarctica was the most horrible thing I had read in a long time. Possibly ever? No, surely it could not have been that. But my memory struggles to locate a piece of writing that had succeeded in upsetting me so thoroughly. So swiftly. And so masterfully - as if that was the main objective of the writing.
The prose in ‘Antarctica’ lures, dangling mystery like the promise of sweets. I would even go so far as to say that it grooms the reader. And the outcome is the very reason your instincts were on high alert all along, fighting that tipsy sense of comfort the author had tried to distract you with.
After some internal debate over whether to say explicitly what happens in the story, I’ve decided against it. Part of its gift, after all, is the surprise factor. But I will say that it managed to unsettle me not only at the visceral, but also at the cerebral level. There was an unexpectedly misogynistic element to it, I thought. Is ‘Antarctica’ a thinly veiled fable about what happens to women who don’t do as they should? Some reviewers seem to think so at least. But then an even more chilling possibility occurred to me: Perhaps the story is a metaphor for relationships between men and women in general.
Though none of the other stories in the collection had as intense an impact on me as the first, they all had a sort of magnetic quality that is difficult to articulate.
In some small, but significant way, ‘Antarctica’ (the story) reminds me of Tim Krabbé’s The Vanishing. It would not surprise me if Keegan had been influenced by the Dutch author. Overall, Antarctica (the collection) wanders not only geographically, but stylistically. More than anything, it’s the overarching sense of wilful unpleasantness that gives the stories cohesion.
Being pathologically curious, I of course felt compelled to research the person who wreaked such havoc on me with one modestly sized short story collection. Claire Keegan was born and raised in rural Ireland, whereupon she lived and studied in New Orleans as a young adult. I suppose that does explain some things. But her writing is too terse to be described as Southern Gothic influenced. Nor would I say it reads as distinctly Irish, in the way that John Banville, Anne Enright, or even Jaki McCarrick do. Perhaps it’s the lack of sentimentality, or ceremony, that sets Claire Keegan’s writing apart.
No sooner had I finished Antarctica, than I gave it away to a friend I met for lunch - almost flinging it in her direction with a sense of relief, when she asked had I read anything interesting lately.
And to my slowly unfolding terror, she too produced a book from her handbag and reached it to me in exchange.
It was the novel Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan. (And yes, of course I am reading it.)
