Claire Keegan is having quite the moment, inasmuch as literary authors can - deservedly so! Her novel Small Things Like These made it onto last year’s Booker shortlist (and proving its worth by not winning despite being the best book nominated) and is currently being adapted into a Cillian Murphy film. Her previous novel, Foster, is a gem of a book and was also made into a movie. So Keegan is definitely getting recognised as a major talent and her audience is steadily growing.
Which is probably what explains this slight book, So Late in the Day. It’s a collection of three short stories, all previously published. The title story appeared in The New Yorker in 2022; The Long and Painful Death in Walk the Blue Fields; Antarctica in Keegan’s first collection of the same name. With only one new story to offer (I’m further speculating that Keegan’s working on her new book but it won’t be ready until next year at the earliest), the publisher likely wanted to capitalise on Keegan’s recent success and have a new book for sale with her name on in 2023 but needed to beef up the page count a smidge so we have two previously collected stories included with So Late in the Day.
Though that isn’t to say the stories are randomly selected - they all share a similar theme and that theme could also have been the title of this book: Men are Bastards! All the male characters in these stories are unpleasant at the least (and in one case psychopathic) while the female characters are put-upon and blameless.
Antarctica is also the best story in both its original collection and this one, and The Long and Painful Death is one of the highlights of Walk the Blue Fields as well. The newest story though, So Late in the Day, isn’t among Keegan’s better works.
So Late in the Day is about an Irish fella called Cathal who’s been left at the altar by a French woman called Sabine after she decided he was a selfish, spoiled git. Which he certainly is - we see his stinginess when it comes to money, his childishness when faced with the reality of cohabiting, and the way he behaves towards others. And men like Cathal do exist - I’ve met a few and I’m sure you have as well.
But they’re also easy targets to lampoon because they have so few redeeming qualities so it doesn’t feel like Keegan is saying or doing anything especially clever in taking down such low hanging fruit. How else are you meant to feel towards such a pathetic, unlikeable wretch?
Although Sabine’s abruptness in leaving Cathal at the altar, having known his personality for some time, suggests calculation on her part so maybe the message of the story is that Women are Bastards Too (or at least French women are)? I just didn’t find the story all that impressive.
The Long and Painful Death is about a female writer temporarily living in Heinrich Boll’s Irish house to work and gets interrupted by an ornery old man - because Men are Bastards! But don’t worry, she gets her revenge on him. And it’s a clever kind of revenge too - the story is made all the more compelling for its unpredictability. The Forester’s Daughter is the best story in Walk the Blue Fields but The Long and Painful Death is up there too.
Antarctica is a melodramatic - in a positively entertaining way - story about a middle-aged married woman looking for an extramarital affair and meeting up with a man in a bar, only to discover he’s not the charmer she took him for - because Men are Bastards! The story is engaging from the start and only gets better up until the twist ending.
If I hadn’t read these three stories before, I’d rate this book higher, and the fact that two-thirds of the book contains republished material gives it the feel of a sleazy cash grab. That said, both Antarctica and The Long and Painful Death hold up on re-reading, though I still don’t like So Late in the Day much, and all three are well-written and easy to read.
This isn’t a bad place to start if you’re new to Claire Keegan, or haven’t read her short stories before, but I would recommend her novels instead, which are definitely her best books. And if you’ve read her two short story collections before and you just want to read the new story, you can read it on The New Yorker’s website for free anyway making Men are Bastards a rather superfluous volume.
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