And Keegan’s prose, as she describes this trapped-in-amber world, is both nostalgic and practical: The scope of village life may be small, but its texture is rich.Moments of interpersonal contact shimmer like the dimming jewels of a sense of community that, for many of us, has vanished into bygones. Reading the story I felt immersed in a 19th-century landscape, rather than one set in the years of my own teens.Such homey quaintification of Irishness is a fairly familiar trope, but here it’s likely accurate enough: The country was still sunk in the past in 1985, when a doctor’s prescription was required to buy condoms. All of which is to say, it is utterly unmissable. Small Things Like These is another minor miracle from Keegan, a book that is nostalgic, touching, brutal and angry. The monumental power of Claire Keegan is that she can create these cuckoo-clock narratives where every single word seems to be a necessary contribution to the overall mechanism of the novel.
As soon as you pick the novel up, it’s all over. It is also a touching Christmas tale, genuinely reminiscent of the festive stories of O Henry and Charles Dickens a novel that has been seeped in sherry and served by the fireside. The novel isn’t just an eloquent attack on these laundries, however. Keegan is clever to funnel the novel’s perspective through Furlong. However, Keegan has never been a writer to waste a word. Some may be disappointed to discover that Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan’s first novel in more than a decade, is a mere 114 pages long.
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