Domestic Detail
Your weekly dose of suburban neurosis from Karori, Wellington
Did you hear Claire Keegan’s interview on RNZ National last Saturday? It was so stressful. As I write this, it’s Wednesday, and my teeth are still clenched together. Seriously, I’ve no enamel left.
Claire Keegan, if you haven’t heard by now, is arguably the finest writer of short novels in English alive today. I say that as someone who doesn’t habitually read short novels and can’t stand the term novella, which attempts to gussy up something that’s neither one thing nor another. You’re either an economist and emotionally withholding, and so you write a short story, or you are an optimist and self-involved, and thus a novelist. This distinction should be taught in schools.
If you must know, I find short story writers annoying to the point of offensive – it’s a prejudice I haven’t probed but has something to do with them always starting in the middle of things, making you race to catch up, and then ending with a flourish, leaving you grasping for the message. What I don’t like about this is that short story writers have a technical facility that they can’t help waving in your face – like someone who won’t stop touching her wedding ring in your company, even when they know you’re single.
When I finally read ‘Small Things Like These’ it stayed warm and alive in my mind, like lamplight, for weeks.
But then came Claire Keegan, with her miniature stories enclosed like snow-globes, and I had to review my entire personality. When I finally read Small Things Like These it stayed warm and alive in my mind, like lamplight, for weeks. The kindly coal merchant Bill Furlong, after finding an abused girl at a convent, now facing a terrible choice – amid a savage winter in rural Ireland, at a time when cruelty to children was ingrained and standing up to the church unthinkable.
The story was masterful and would have been enough by itself; but the writing was also as crisp as a painting. And Keegan’s sentences gleamed, their wisdom compressed into gems. If you could hold each one up, you would see yourself inside them.
Claire Keegan is a life-changing genius to whom I’m now devoted and possibly obsessed, which is why listening to her on the radio is both painful and ecstatic. Her opinions on writing, imagination, Ireland, misogyny and the difference between drama and tension are deeply thoughtful, hard-earned, and worth waiting for - and wait we must, for she famously publishes her masterpieces years apart, and appears to be no fan of press tours.
But, for the love of Pete, she doesn’t yield them easily. After listening to any of her encounters, I’m left in a reel. Obviously, there’s admiration pixelating around my brain. This is what it must be like to have a fine mind, I’m left thinking. This is what it must be like to live half in, half out of your imagination, without concern for the daily domestic detail that clutters up and buries lives like mine.
No, it isn’t Keegan but the interviewer I worry about once the On Air light switches off, because they’re surely now having an identity crisis. Before this interview, they imagined they were good at their job. They very probably are good at their job; they just feel defeated all of a sudden, or possibly exposed.
I suppose the clue is in her author photographs. Claire Keegan, let’s face it, seems to boil with disdain. She has one of those expressions that say, “let’s just get this over with”. Photographers always seem to pose her in dark places, against gnarled trees or a darkening sky. I mean, fair enough – she probably wouldn’t agree to get in a ball-pit at a burger joint. Still, all the glowering should give radio producers a hint – that this lady’s not for turning.
It also doesn’t help that she’s fawned over, even by the BBC (you’d think they’d be used to interviewing luminaries – the interviewers are so often luminaries themselves. But you can hear the awe in their voices). Sean Rocks of RTÉ gave it a good go, with chuckles and bonhomie, which contrasted with Keegan’s flat affect and refusal to be jollied. He asks her, reasonably pointing out that Small Things Like These won The George Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, how political the book is?
“I’m the wrong person to ask,” she replies to a bit of a stir. “I really am. I don’t measure my work that way, I don’t analyze my work…in any case, I don’t think it should be measurable and I didn’t see it as a political act when I wrote it. I have a degree in political science, actually…I just trust that my thoughtfulness and my politics will come out in my work.”
Eleanor Wachtel of the CBC’s Writers and Company is similarly dashed on the rocks. She repeats Keegan’s idea that stories find writers and asks, “How does that work?”
“Oh, I don’t know how it works, nobody knows how it works. I’ve never met anybody who knows how it works. Not that I go around asking people…I really don’t have any idea and don’t intend to do so.”
She isn’t being difficult; it’s just that these questions don’t matter. Listening to these and other interviews makes you wonder what questions would interest her, and whether she’s impatient with most people, whose minds aren’t plumbed as deeply.
Eleanor can’t let go of Bill Furlong as a Christ-like figure. She wants things to work out well for him beyond the ending of the story – every reader does. Keegan accepts Furlong’s heroism but refuses to offer any comfort: “Heroes..die. They don’t come to good ends. They don’t save anyone, really. They suffer. And certainly, people who were brave and went up against the Catholic church in this country, they suffered horribly.
“Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean that I know what it’s about, and I mean that most sincerely.”
“So, I see it as the story of someone who has stuck a knife in his own life. Everything he’s worked for. But really, that’s just my interpretation of it. Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean that I know what it’s about, and I mean that most sincerely.” Eleanor’s discomfort is so obvious I can’t listen to the rest.
Susie Ferguson of RNZ Saturday Morning starts strongly by revealing Keegan’s love of horses, which seems to disarm her. But ultimately, Keegan’s diffidence returns, and what she says about short stories not wanting to be written seems apt. She might as well be saying, writers don’t want to be interviewed:
“Have you ever been to a wedding and when it comes time for the speeches to be made, you really hope that the person who wants the microphone doesn’t get the microphone? Well in a way, storytelling is sometimes to do with the person who gets the microphone, and the short story is actually given to the person who doesn’t want the microphone, which is one of the reasons why short stories are short [and] have an unwilling narrator.”
Later she disagrees sharply with Susie, insisting that writing thirty drafts of the same story is nothing special. Later still, there will be frosty pauses. She will not be charmed, even by a small and unassuming country of readers with a well-intentioned public radio station.
Listening to Claire Keegan, a friend later texts me. She’s a wee bit of an arsehole.
There is a dreamy quality in the way Keegan speaks, but with flint underneath. She communicates in statements, and often says no, I don’t think so or not at all. Her characters have nothing to do with her once on the page. Their time with her is her business, not ours. Our feelings about her stories are our business, not hers.
I don’t know why this feels like an ice-bucket challenge. Maybe it’s because of literary festival culture, or years of polite podcasts about books and authors, but we’ve forgotten that writers can be bloody-minded, introverted, impatient with the public, or glazed with boredom and unafraid to show it.
But it’s been ages – possibly generations - since I’ve heard a writer whose work I love this much refusing to sand down their own edges. Writers have become entertainers at festivals and events, taking care to be broadly appealing, agreeing to take part in jolly themed panels or confected literary challenges that may have nothing to do with the work they’ve just published. The extrovert writer is what we as a modern audience demand and expect – a refusal to appear in public, like Elena Ferrante, is so unusual that the refusal itself becomes the story.
I expect Claire Keegan can continue to be unflinching – recalcitrant, contrarian, impatient or even an arsehole, however the fancy takes her – and we’ll all continue to sit, in wonder, at her feet. This is because her talent excuses any need to gratify other people – to indulge their questions, mollify, or soothe their feelings – in the way that others, perhaps less extraordinary than she is, are conditioned to do. Small things, like these, which weigh so many of us down. But we can release them as burdens, by reading her prose.
What are you reading this week? I’m re-reading three fantastic non-fiction books for RNZ Saturday Morning on April 13 - Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Ruth Reichl’s Garlic & Sapphires and Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four: the Beatles in time.