Photograph: Patrick Bolger/The Observer
Claire Keegan’s five books to date run to just 700 pages and some 140,000 words. “I love to see prose being written economically,” she tells me. “Elegance is saying just enough. And I do believe that the reader completes the story.” Revered by critics and prize judges for the miraculous density of her short fiction ever since her 1999 debut, Antarctica, she became an international bestseller two years ago with her first novel, Small Things Like These, about an Irish coal merchant whose eyes are opened one Christmas to the horror behind the walls of his biggest customer, a laundry run by nuns. “I think the book was taking off before it was shortlisted for the Booker prize,” Keegan, speaking from her home on the Wexford coast after technology thwarts our planned video call. “A lot of the sales went through word of mouth. A lot of people bought the book for other people for Christmas. People read it and bought it for other people in the new year. Now it’s on the school syllabus here.”
The novel, which won last year’s Orwell prize for political fiction, takes its epigraph from the 1916 proclamation of the Irish republic, pledging “equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens”, a damning prelude to a book about systematised misogyny. Keegan’s new book, So Late in the Day, a 64-page story published as a standalone hardback, examines the theme from another angle. It follows Cathal, a civil servant clock-watching his way through the remaining desk hours of a sunny summer Friday in modern Dublin. Something is off – why won’t he look at his phone? – but what, we can’t tell, until his mind replays a disagreement with his ex-fiancee, Sabine, a French gallery worker, about what men – specifically, Irish men – want from women.
An understated cousin to Kristen Roupenian’s dating horror, Cat Person (which likewise first appeared in the New Yorker), So Late in the Day began life around a decade ago, devised by Keegan – a teacher of creative writing for 30 years – as a way to show her students how fiction can be tense without being dramatic. “I just went to the board in class and drew out a version of the story, which I made up as I went along, about a man who goes to the office and it’s Friday evening and he gets off work and catches the bus home. Then a few things happen to him which seem to be undramatic, and actually are, if you’re looking at them from outside. But for him they’re moments of tension, and the tension reveals his loss.” One day a student asked if she had actually written it. “The way she asked made me believe that she was going to write it; I thought, I’d better write that story.”
