Claire Keegan: 'Small Things Like These'

 Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is my kind of book: short in length, big in scope.

It’s about an Irish fellow named Furlong, a coal and firewood merchant who just wants to live a quiet life and provide for his wife and five daughters. But he witnesses an injustice. If he gets involved, it means trouble — the kind of social trouble you can’t avoid and have to pay for.

If you grew up wondering how so many people could accede to a racist, apartheid social order, this book might be for you. If you are still wondering how a wealthy, self-satisfied country can accept such inequality in the treatment of its residents, this book might be for you. It’s short, but the questions at its foundation are substantial.

If you’re a writer or an aspiring writer, allow Ms. Keegan to give you a writing lesson. I copied 10 sentences into my notebook. Here’s one from the beginning, setting the scene in New Ross, a small city in Ireland, around Christmas 1985:

 

And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under the doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.

 

I think I’m going to try to read everything Claire Keegan has written.

• Source: Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; New York: Grove Press, 2017, p. 2.