The chasm between men and women is so vast in Claire Keegan’s story collection, “So Late in the Day,” that her characters might as well speak different languages. (In two of the three stories, they do.)
Each of these tight, potent stories takes place over just a few hours, and each explores the fraught dynamics between two people, a man and a woman.
In the title story, Cathal goes through his day, thinking about the woman he loved. Sabine — glamorous, French — had agreed to marry him but grew more and more troubled by his hidebound, parsimonious ways.
When she moves in with him, he is overwhelmed by her possessions, "which she placed and hung about the house … as though the house now belonged to her also."
In "The Long and Painful Death," a writer who is in residence at Heinrich Böll's house on remote Achill Island finds her work interrupted — but also inspired — by a German man who becomes increasingly hostile.
And in the third story, the chilling "Antarctica," a woman heads into the city for Christmas shopping and illicit romance. "Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man," the story begins. Between that word "happily" in the first sentence and the word "hell" in the last lies a brief but harrowing journey.
Keegan's stories are built around character rather than action, but they never flag. The tension builds almost imperceptibly until it is suddenly unbearable.
As in her stunning, tiny novels, "Foster" and "Small Things Like These," she has chosen her details carefully. Everything means something — the woman on the bus reading Roddy Doyle's "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors," his novel about domestic abuse; the man who offers to cook dinner and chooses "a fish that looked like it was still alive" and has its head chopped off; the man struggling to open a bottle of Champagne: "The cork was stubborn and tight — but he kept pushing at it with his thumbs until the cork gave and finally came away with an exhausted little pop."
