Claire Keegan, author of 'So Late in the Day,' is a writer you should be reading

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."

Her details are so natural that readers might not immediately understand their significance. The stories grow richer with each read.

All three stories pivot on a clash of expectations and desires, with women wanting independence and adventure and men expecting old-fashioned subservience and feeling baffled when they do not get it. That bafflement carries an ominous undercurrent; a threat of danger runs through each tale.

These stories are not brand-new; "So Late in the Day" was published in the New Yorker in 2022 and the other two appeared in previous Keegan collections. They have been revised for this collection. Packaged together, read fresh, they have new and powerful things to say about the ever-mystifying, ever-colliding worlds of contemporary Irish women and the men who stand in their way.

Laurie Hertzel is a freelance critic in the Twin Cities. She is at lauriehertzel@gmail.com

So Late in the Day

By: Claire Keegan.

Publisher: Grove Press, 120 pages, $20.