When he went out, it was snowing. So begins the culminating scene in Claire Keegan’s new novella, Small Things Like These. It’s an elegant and economical transition that delivers the beautiful, uneasy excitement of snowfall to a rapidly escalating plot.
Bill Furlong, the protagonist of the book, is wrapping up the last of his Christmas Eve customer visits. He’s a small business owner, a husband, and father to five daughters, who is doing a bit better than just ok during the recession years of 1980’s Ireland. In deft, musical sentences, the book brings us into Furlong’s inner monologue—a series of present-tense moments from his happy, relatable family life against a contrapunctus of memories from his impoverished and challenging childhood.
But now, on this snowy evening, his past and present have converged in the person of an unwed teenage mother who is locked inside the coal shed of one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. In the rapidly escalating story that ensues, Furlong must contend with an impulse to help that is in direct conflict with the all-powerful Irish church-state.
There’s a lot to love in this slim, perfectly wrought book, but the thing that got me in the gut is how carefully Keegan conveys the knife edge of precarity and privilege. Furlong’s life is perilously balanced, like mine is—like a lot of ours are. He has enough money, right now. His business is doing well, right now. His daughters are safe, doing well in school, right now. But as the economy slips, more and more of his customers ask to put their bill “on the slate.” And the lorry that he uses to deliver fuel is going to need a new engine soon, which means no new storm windows for his house—something he is loath to tell his wife.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew…the dole queues were getting longer and there were men out there who couldn’t pay their ESB bills, living in houses no warmer than bunkers, sleeping in their overcoats.
We know this economic calculus well. We fear the catastrophic hospital bill, the parent who suddenly needs more care than we can easily give, especially with a drumbeat of recession warnings pounding away at us. We are tired from working too much. Our kids are stressed. People seem always to be arguing.
Like some of us, Furlong carries the weight of his difficult childhood in ways that make this balance of precarity and privilege more difficult. His experiences strengthen his empathy but also undermine his confidence. He knows how far he has come and there is resilience in this achievement, but he also knows, first hand, that the world is cruel. To have overcome adversity means you are strong, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t afraid.
Claire Keegan’s answer to this conundrum is to lay out a rapidly accelerating series of events and small choices in such a way as to show what it looks like to practice self-compassion for your fear, moment by moment, and at the same time, lean in to your courage. There will be no deus ex machina on Christmas morning. There’s just Bill Furlong, putting one foot in front of the other, working through all of the things that are hard for him in the privacy of his own mind, until he suddenly finds himself able to do something that is unequivocally amazing.
When he went out it was snowing. When I read this sentence, I was reminded of an earlier story of Ireland, written 115 years ago by James Joyce in his story, “The Dead”: Snow was general all over Ireland. There is a way in which Small Things Like These is a true and rightful successor to “The Dead.” I’d go so far as to say it’s arguably a better and more noble version in both execution and grace. Both stories are marvels of craftsmanship. Both peer into the darkness of the human soul. But, where Joyce is balancing loss and forgiveness, Keegan is balancing fear and courage. Where Joyce’s “snow falls faintly . . . through the universe upon all the living and the dead,” Keegan’s ushers in a “fresh, new unrecognisable joy . . . in the face of a world of trouble.” I recommend reading both of them this holiday season.
*An earlier version of this essay is on Courtney Cook’s Substack, “Survival by Book.”*
Courtney Cook is a writer who works in a technology company. She lives in Wilder, VT and publishes the weekly newsletter, "Survival by Book," at courtneycook.substack.com.