066: About a Small, Brave, Beautiful Book
Claire Keegan's "Small Things Like These" will shore up your courage and remind you to hope against hope. Plus, the OG SBB essay featuring "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel
Anyone else having trouble sleeping?
Last night I woke up to a litany of worry from over the transom of the world: nuclear, conscription, displacement, shortage, unrest, virus, polarization, collapse, instability, worry, prices.
Daily, it seems like, I walk around with a list of self-exhortations: do more, be more creative, be smarter, be kinder, be grateful, waste less time, save money, be a better listener, get more exercise, eat more vegetables, scroll less. At night, I fall asleep from the exhaustion of this, only to wake up at 1am to a ghoul-parade of my worst behaviors and mistakes and the world’s most frightening news items, expertly curated by the most anxious and pessimistic parts of me.
Some nights I can tell these noxious selves to chill out and go back to sleep and they do.
Other nights, not so much.
Bill Furlong, the protagonist of Irish writer Claire Keegan’s very short novel, Small Things Like These, is also up at night.
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. Yet, as he goes about his business, he has a litany of competing images in his head: there is the starving son of a drunken father, drinking the milk set out for the cats behind the priests’ house; here are his rosy cheeked daughters, baking cakes with their mother in their cozy kitchen. There are the townspeople who jeer at him for being an illegitimate son of a kitchen maid; here are the loyal men who work for him, delivering coal and other fuel against the coming cold.
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.
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. Furlong’s past and present are about to converge in the person of an unwed teenage mother who is locked inside the coal shed of one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries.
He couldn’t properly see and was obliged to go back to the lorry, for the torch. When he shone it on what was there, he judged, by what was on the floor, that the girl within had been there for longer than the night.
‘Christ,’ he said.
The only thing he thought to do was to take his coat off. When he did, and went to put it round her, she cowered.
In the rapidly escalating story that ensues, Furling is on increasingly dangerous ground as he contends with the way his impulse to help will put him in conflict with Irish church-state and the power it holds over the people and commerce of his small village.
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. Furling’s life is perilously balanced, like I 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, Furling 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.
A lot of us are here right now, I think. I am present to the knowledge that I am one unlucky incident away from disaster: I could fall ill or one of my kids could fall ill. I could lose my job or have to leave it. My car could break down in some kind of fatal way. (Ok, that already did happen last month.)
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 any momentary sense of well-being. We are tired from working too much. Our kids are stressed. People seem always to be arguing.
Like some of us, Furling 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.
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 Furling, 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 whichSmall 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 over loss, 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.
Three More Books to Get You Through Winter
The great, gifted, and marvelously strange Hilary Mantel passed away a few weeks ago. Amongst her long list of literary contributions is her Wolf Hall trilogy, which has to be the only book series this century to credibly and compellingly resuscitate a powerful white man, thanks to how she made a world of readers feel affection for Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light are the best kind of long, absorbing, escapist historical fiction—enough to see you through the coldest of winters, probably.
Plus, the story of Cromwell’s trafficking of illegal editions of the Gutenberg Bible in Wolf Hall was the inspiration of Survival by Book, so there’s that, as well. Here’s the opening of the title essay.
Let’s begin with a hypothesis: reading a printed book—cloth-bound or paperback, deckle-edged or trimmed, dog-eared or ‘mint’, purchased or loaned—is one of the most disruptive things you can do right now.
And by disruptive I mean in the political sense, as in protest, revolt, and subvert. Also the creative sense, as in make it new, or even, self-care. I don’t mean mayhem. Not really.
Well, maybe a little.
Share Survival by Book | Get a t-shirt | Find us on Twitter and Facebook
Oooh another book for my TBR - thanks! Also, I would like to second your rec of the Wolf Hall trilogy. I didn’t think I would like it, based on the subject matter, but my mom insisted that it would pull me in and as usual, she was right.
There have been a few more recent ones, but the middle-of-the-night book that comes to mind is High Tide in Tucson. I read it while nursing a newborn who seemed to be nocturnal. It got me through, and I still return to and think about that book, now my baby is almost 12.
Love this. A book that really helped me in a time of need was The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.