In 2010 Irish writer Claire Keegan scored a stunning success with her 88-page novel “Foster,” winning several important prizes and collecting reviews that compared her work to Chekhov’s and the poetry of Seamus Heaney.
Her latest novel, “Small Things Like These,” has also been enthusiastically received. Both are praised for their honesty, their attention to detail—the right detail—not the mention of every object in the room as seems now to be the way of our overly long American fictions.
This stunning, brilliant novel takes on, quietly, what was a cultural earthquake in Ireland, the uncovering of one of the church’s most disgraceful secrets, the Magdalene laundries. The year is 1985. Bill Furlong operates a small coal and timber business. At this yard, men unload barges of coal, put it into bags, and most days, Furlong delivers this warmth to his customers.
Life is good and steady, business fair, although the economy is failing, with many emigrating to England and beyond. It is Christmas time, the weather is exceptionally cold and while Bill is delivering to the local convent, he encounters a young woman, scrubbing a floor, who asks for a ride to the river, where she can drown herself. Bill is shocked, demurs, and goes about his business.
On another visit he comes upon a girl who has been locked overnight in a coal shed barefoot. She begs him to enquire about her baby. Where is it? Who is feeding it? The convent takes in girls who have “gotten into trouble.” They labor in the laundries. Is it sanctuary or punishment, employment or forced labor? It is unclear at that time what happened to their babies: adopted? Died?
Bill cannot get this out of his mind. He himself was an illegitimate child, raised safely in a rich woman’s house when she kept Bill’s mother on, didn’t throw her out or send her to the nuns. His practical, cautious wife reminds him, their five girls are fine and they all have nothing to do with the convent and laundry. Christmas week, the family visits the town’s nativity scene. Even in the stable, the Christ child had a warm manger and people who loved him.
Slightly lost on a country road making deliveries, Bill asks an old man “Would you mind telling me where this road will lead me.” The old fellow answers: “This road will take you wherever you want to go, son.” And so it is. We decide where we will take ourselves.
Bill rescues the ragged, barefoot girl and takes her to his home, hand in hand, down the main street of town. He knows the church is all-powerful, reaches everywhere. He knows he is risking, to some degree, his business, the future of his own children, but he overcomes his fear and asks himself “was there any point in being alive without helping one another?”
