Claire Keegan’s newly published short story collection, So Late in the Day, contains three tales that testify to the screwed up relations between women and men. To give you a hint about Keegan’s views on who’s to blame for that situation, be aware that when the title story was published in France earlier this year, it was called, “Misogynie.”
In that story, a Dublin office worker named Cathal is feeling the minutes drag by on a Friday afternoon. Something about the situation soon begins to seem “off.” Cathal’s boss comes over and urges him to “call it a day”; Cathal absentmindedly neglects to save the budget file he’s been working on. He refrains from checking his messages on the bus ride home, because, as we’re told, he: “found he wasn’t ready — then wondered if anyone ever was ready for what was difficult or painful.” Cathal eventually returns to his empty house and thinks about his fiancée who’s moved out.
On first reading we think: poor guy, he’s numb because he’s been dumped; on rereading — and Keegan is the kind of writer whose spare, slippery work you want to reread — maybe we think differently. Keegan’s sentences shape shift the second time ’round, twisting themselves into a more emotionally complicated story. For instance, here’s her brief description of how Cathal’s bus ride home ends:
[A]t the stop for Jack White’s Inn, a young woman came down the aisle and sat in the vacated seat across from him. He sat breathing in her scent until it occurred to him that there must be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of women who smelled the same.
Perhaps Cathal is clumsily trying to console himself; perhaps, though, the French were onto something in entitling this story, “Misogynie.”
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