It’s a mark of a really good book: You keep seeing things in it.
I’ve mentioned Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These several times. But I’m just now getting the point that moral people can be self-destructive, and that self-destruction spills over to family members and loved ones.
The book is about a coalman named Furlong who sees a case of abuse and does something about it, even though his action is sure to offend powerful people.
You can read it as a heroic tale. But Keegan said the book began as short story about a boy who is making deliveries of coal with his father. They find another boy locked in a coal shed at a boarding school. The father simply locks the door back up and goes on without saying a word.
Keegan thought about what it must be like to carry that burden around — the burden of seeing a wrong and doing nothing. The coalman’s point of view took over the story. Small Things Like These became a vastly different story.
People who do the right thing sometimes don’t count the costs, and some of us are slow to see and talk about the reckoning.
• Sources and notes: Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; New York: Grove Press, 2017.
“Claire Keegan on Small Things Like These: ‘I wasn’t setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland”; The Booker Prizes, Dec. 2, 2024. The interview is here:
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/claire-keegan-interview-small-things-like-these
For a sample of an earlier note on this wonderful book, see “Anatomy of a one-night read,” July 4, 2024.
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