Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
The portrait of a man called to act.
Finished: 29 November 2022 Rating: ★★★★☆
A bracing tale in miniature of an Irish man, Bill Furlong, who starts to wonder what it’s all for. The year is 1985. We descend into New Ross, County Wexford, where Furlong is a hard-working, well-respected family man and coal merchant who takes a quiet pride in his five daughters, devoted wife, and the coal yard that he runs — by all measures, a man who should be satisfied with his lot.
But as Christmas nears, he finds himself reflecting and the past and on where his life is going. Memories surface of his mother, who raised Furlong with no hint of his father. He thinks with fondness of Mrs Wilson, the woman who took them in, and Ned, her keeper of the grounds. Exhausted each day from the coal yard, he wishes for more time to think and rise above the daily stupor, but his wife Eileen can’t see the good in that. She’s got her girls to raise, chores to do, mass to attend.
Against the backdrop of Furlong’s brewing unease, the tension of the novella arises during a coal delivery to the convent next door to the school his girls attend. After letting himself into the barn to drop the coal off, Furlong is suddenly faced with the image of his mother in a girl he finds inside, shivering, starving, asking him where her child is. Mother Superior sweeps in, handling the awkward encounter with command and coolness, asking about his daughters, reminding Furlong by implication that to push his nose too far into business not his own will eventually affect the fates of his family. Frozen as to what to do, he leaves without doing anything except taking some money from Mother Superior, but he misses a turn on the way back, so taken is his mind. He stops to ask a man where the road is going. “This road will take you wherever you want to go, son,” the man says — a line that lodges itself in Furlong’s mind and rolls around, echoing.
What is spectacular about this novella is it is decidedly not postmodern, or post-post-modern or metamodern or whichever layer of nihilism we’re currently entertaining.* Rather than abandoning everything he has to search for something that will provide him with more meaning, or ragging endlessly on the drudgery and absurdity of life, Furlong takes a decidedly moral stance and chooses the actions that will define his character. This story is ultimately one of courage in its deepest sense — courage, to borrow from Paul Tillich, as the affirmation of what is essential and true in the self. There is a review in The Guardian that paints this novel as Dickensian and then notes that Keegan’s writing is often much darker and more violent. The reviewer is then disappointed in the book not feeling as devastating, as lasting, as her previous work, suggesting that this is perhaps because Furlong is too far from the dark side of town. Two things should be resisted: firstly, the temptation to paint this story as little more than a Hallmark movie, and secondly, the implication that violent trauma is required for something to be moving and meaningful. At the risk of giving the plot away to make my point, I think it must be said that Furlong making a choice of exemplary courage is perhaps one of the most hardcore things that could happen in modern fiction. The confluence of memories, thoughts, and encounters that bring him to that point is also beautifully woven together.
Stoner by John Williams, a brilliant novel in ways I don’t think Williams intended, is an apt foil for Furlong because for the most part, life happens to Stoner — there is rarely a moment when he takes life by the lapels and gives it a good shake. And when he tries to, he embarks on a path that fizzles out. At the same time, Stoner acknowledges the things that we cannot change, the things that wear Furlong down and make him question what his life is for. So much of our modern narrative is one of passivity and victimhood. While much of our lives are determined by the chance of birth, it is one thing to understand that people are dealt certain hands in life and it is another to disclaim all responsibility for one’s own life due solely to structural and circumstantial features. Although Small Things Like These seems like a traditional tale of morality, Furlong’s act of courage illustrates the fullness of humanity — what we can be, what we should be. We are in an age where our technology demands more than ever before that we tell it who we are, and yet at the same time, it has bent us so far out of shape that soon we may be unrecognisable.
Where will this road take us? Whether we ask this question of the world at large or of ourselves and our individual lives, the road we are on takes us wherever we want to go. And in the end, after wandering the streets on Christmas Eve in turmoil, Furlong does something that many of us may forever lack the courage to do — he chooses where he wants to go.
[*] This isn’t entirely fair — see: metamodernism and “New Sincerity” as the cultural sucessors of post-modernism. I don’t know that this has kept pace in literature, though, but I leave it to one side because Small Things Like These doesn’t quite fit the metamodernist bill, either.