By Kyle Ticali
If you read enough traditionally published fiction, you start to notice recurring quirks – especially when you skip around the decades. It can be jarring, for instance, to transition from Ursula K. LeGuin to Brandon Sanderson, or from Toni Morrison to Colleen Hoover. It isn’t the autorial quality, per se; You may enjoy these works just fine. Yet, still, something is missing. Or, to use more trendy parlance, the vibe is off. You find yourself skipping lines, skimming paragraphs. You roll your eyes at a phrase or two. When you put the book down, you shrug, and then you don’t think about it much, or maybe never again. At least until the movie or series is announced for streaming, though who knows if the project will ever actually go into production.
Suppose, despite the feeling of offness, you enjoyed those books enough to read more. You’ll certainly have your pick. Colleen puts out one a year, give or take, and Brandon will finish two by the time you’re done reading this article. There’s always more where that came from. This is not just true of those authors, who I am not picking on, but a tragic reality. With advances and royalties being what they are, they have joined the grind-economy. Can you really deride someone for wanting to provide for their families and pay their mortgage? The writing industry is stratifying and writers are relying on volume to keep their heads above water.
You’d think this would lead to shorter, more economical works of fiction. After all, if more books equals more money, the faster you produce those books the better off you’ll be. The modern incentives of the industry are akin to the turn around at a restaurant. You gotta flip those tables!
Sometimes the demands of the industry do lead to shorter works when the author in question is particularly good at the business side of things. The longest Chuck Tingle book, for example, is 304 pages. Maybe this is the reason why best sellers are trending shorter, as a recent study by Wordrated found, but most adult novels are still weighing in at around 400 pages, and I would be loath to call most of them economical.
Authors who go against this grain exist, but they’re few and far between, so it’s always a pleasant surprise to discover others, as I recently have with Claire Keegan. Maybe you have already heard of her and, to you, I’m behind the times, but I would wager most people (Americans, at least) have not. I endeavor to rectify that.
Keegan is an Irish author living in County Wexford, a rural area near where she was raised. Even with her success, she has kept her day job; something that is normally the antithesis to the writer’s goal. Aren’t we all hoping to make it big so that we can spike our apron down onto the boss’s desk and tell them where to shove their unpaid lunch breaks? Her day job is not one of meaningless toil. She’s fortunate enough to be a creative writing teacher, having a residency at multiple universities throughout her career. I would imagine that, for her, in this way, the work is the work.
Her 1999 debut novel, Antarctica, was named a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and her novella Foster was adapted into the 2022 Oscar-nominated film The Quiet Girl. Not a hidden gem by any means, and yet so outside of the culture. Booktok is not obsessing over Claire Keegan. YouTubers aren’t making video essays about her. There are no subreddits, meme pages, or Discords devoted to her creations.
It’s a shame to not be aware of Keegan’s work, because it has a low investment of time with a high reward. During a discussion regarding the length of her works, Claire Keegan said in a 2021 interview with The Guardian, “I think something needs to be as long as it needs to be.” Primarily a short story writer, Keegan has a preoccupation with brevity. Her longest work, a critically acclaimed novella aptly named Small Things Like These, contains a tight 118 pages. The audiobook, narrated leisurely by Aidan Kelly, only takes 1 hour and 57 minutes to complete. In less time than it would take to watch Spider-Man: No Way Home, that year’s highest-grossing film in the United States, you could finish the little green book and have ample time leftover to put a dent in one of her award-winning short story collections, too. It is, without question, a quick read.
Her work is not only short (a quality that is not inherently good or bad, but can signal other expectations), it’s intentional. There is a succinctness to her writing that rewards your time and attention. I frequently walk away from modern books wondering, “What was the point of that?” rhetorically, knowing the answer is that there was no point; it was happening just for it to happen, words typed to get to the next page. This could be authors bloating their work to meet genre standards, or paranormal cozy mystery writer Jennifer Lepp freely stating that they let large language models (LLMs) write settings for them. In much of the modern fiction milieu, words aren’t exercises in intentionality.
With Keegan’s work, however, I frequently ask, “What was the point of that?” academically, wondering at the meaning behind it.
Yet, even with all of its concision, Small Things Like These couldn’t be described as simple. It follows a man named Bill Furlong, the child of a single mother, as he grapples with his place in a struggling Irish community in 1985. Bill and his family, a wife and five girls, are able to scrape by on his wages as a coal merchant. It iswas only through the daily kindnesses of his mother’s employer, Mrs. Wilson, that she iswas able to rear him and support his education, which afforded him these opportunities. Many of Bill’s neighbors are not as well off, and cannot pay their bills for the coal that they’ve received from him in the harsh winter. As the novella goes on, Bill not only discovers the identity of his paternal father, but uncovers an open secret in his town of New Ross, Ireland: the local convent, a supposed training school for girls, is indeed a Magdalene laundry.
By the 1980s, Magdalene laundries were largely Roman Catholic institutions operating under the guise of housing “fallen women” but, in actuality, served as grim penitentiary workhouses. Women unfortunate enough to be ensnared found themselves punished in the name of so-called moral order, then silenced by a society that discouraged social conscience and incentivized minding what you have, staying on the right side of people and soldiering on. “It’s only people with no children that can afford to be careless,” Bill’s wife tells him. “[They’re] not one of our own.”
Keegan never explains the history of Magdalene laundries in Ireland or elsewhere; she does not pause her telling to exposit at length, or to give the reader greater factual context. This is immaterial to the novella, a work of historical fiction–emphasis on fiction. What is pertinent is how the characters feel about the laundries, how they express themselves with dialogue and deeds. We don’t need to know the extent of their gruesomeness happening in these abattoirs; Bill does know, however, and we can appreciate it through him.
This is how the novella is conveyed–not in conspicuous overtures, but in the fine points. The story is not just the plot, not just turns of events; it’s character and setting, style and symbol–a series of choices which build toward a perfect, shared crescendo. To say that it’s “told” would be an overstatement, giving the impression of sterile facts imparted. It is not a matter of recounting what happens, who it happens to and why. Instead, it’s learned through narrative osmosis; a gentle absorption of minute details.
This immersion is realized by the novella’s very backdrop of the Christmas season, the pinch that time of year puts on pockets and the spirit of giving. It’s found in the minor inclusion of Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol as a gift to Bill when he was a boy, given to him from his mother’s employer and benefactor, who chose to keep her on when she was pregnant, rather than give her her walking papers, as others might have. It’s in the choice that he be raised by a single mother at all, a could-be candidate for the asylum herself, if not for that rare compassion. It’s the way that the shadow of his absentee father falls on Bill’s identity and the hesitation he has to reminisce. The grip the church has on his family, on the school his five daughter’s attend–the only good school for girls in their town, so Bill says–and the future that this promises them, away from the appraising eyes of men. The predominantly female cast of characters that surround him, the destitute, the fortunate, the generous and the predacious. It’s the novella’s refusal to provide simple answers; to do one’s best, to hope, but to be afraid of loss. “It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew.”
You know, small things like these.
Her first novella, Foster, published in The New Yorker in 2010, but treated as a short story until its release in hardcover in 2022, is even subtler than its successor. It’s her second longest work, this one only 87 pages. In case you’ve not a mind for dates and numbers, there was 11 years between this first novella and her second. In the intervening time, there is only one short story collection. Assuming that it would take her the entire 11 years to write Small Things Like These, which is of course silly, it would have been written at the rate of about a word and a syllable a day. This pace would be more than enough fodder to fuel the flame wars on Reddit, giving them someone else to fuss endlessly about with the likes of George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss. Even the Epic of Gilgamesh recently added 20 previously unknown lines to the epic story.
Both novellas, while less than half the size of the average commercial novel, pack a great deal more information and dramatic weight into their pages. Keegan doesn’t speak of completing manuscripts, but rather getting “the text right.” She deploys careful word choices, which only reveal their full implication upon rereads. In fact, she suggests rereading her work at least twice. “I do think no story has ever been read properly unless it’s read twice. So it’s a longer book, you see, than you think it is, because it needs to be read twice. Double the pages,” she told The Guardian.
The work of Ernest Hemingway strikes a not insubstantial similarity to Keegan’s novellas, particularly the predilection for minimalistic storytelling. Read any writing advice books and you’ll no doubt discover what’s known as his Iceberg Theory. “A few things I have found to be true,” Hemingway begins in The Art of the Short Story. “If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless.”
Truly understanding something, having an intimacy with the material, is essential for knowing what it requires of you, and thus what is better left implied and what demands to be written. Hemingway accomplished this by drawing from his experiences as a journalist, from the people he had met and the things that he had witnessed. With this font of inspiration, he created the whole of the iceberg and then he carved out chunks–scrapping anything that wasn’t strictly necessary and leaving only the surface. In To Have And To Have Not, a 55,000 word novel, Hemingway deleted a whopping 100,000 from the final draft. “After all, the test of whether a book is any good is how much good stuff you can remove from it,” he wrote in a letter to his friend Peter Viertel.
Keegan doesn’t do research on her subjects, nor does she write about anyone who she knows. She prefers, she says, to use her imagination. “Language is older and richer than we are and when you go in there and let go and listen, it’s possible to discover something way beyond and richer than your conscious self,” she told the Booker Prize after she had been shortlisted in 2022. Her intimacy with the material, instead, is the product of time spent with it. She writes in two parts: First, taking notes longhand and deciding on the setting and the point of view. This step can often take years before she feels that she knows the characters well enough to begin writing her story. Then, she starts at the keyboard, but this, too, is a long process. She can go through as many as 50 drafts before she feels a manuscript is complete.
Even then, she sometimes still fiddles. In So Late In The Day, the titular short story in the collection of the same name, she changed a line of dialogue between its initial publication in the New Yorker in 2022 and its hardcover release a year later. “I simply thought these were better word choices. These words seemed more revealing, more accurate,” says Keegan to The Guardian. You have to admire an author who is so committed to this–frankly unachievable–level of perfection. It’s a wonderful madness.
In this way, Keegan’s writing is reminiscent of a classic style, not lost but certainly out of vogue. Suffice to say, there are other examples (Annie Dillard, Kazuo Ishiguro, George Saunders and Alice Munro, just to name a handful), but they’re rarely very mainstream, and are seldom acknowledged or celebrated outside of their contemporaries. I often wonder, why is this? Is it only that we live in a hyper-capitalist culture, and that we’ve been convinced that quicker is always more and more is always better? Even a moment’s contemplation of this would conclude this cannot be true. You cannot write and publish three 700 page doorstops a year and expect them all, or any, to be remarkable.
And now for the rhetorical questioning: When did this become the mainstay?
Isn’t the function of art to refine, not just to craft? If the objective was to just convey a story, rather than to tell it well, then every text message thread would be a novel. Do we drink mashed, malted barley, or do we wait patiently and work effortfully for it to be distilled into a more palatable whiskey? Why do certain portions of the general public look to artists as though they are producers for our regular consumption, and show contempt for them when they take their time to make something beautiful for us? For very little monetary reward, I would add. So little that the only way for them to succeed is to commit to bulk production. Why do so many seem unperturbed by this?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers to these questions, and I doubt that you do, either. We all make use of the machine, but the machine is massive and it defies comprehension. We can choose not to maintain all of its parts, however. We can be patient for the things that we love and think are meaningful, and we can support the people who make it in any way that we can, financially or encouragingly, so that they may go on making them. We can shout it from the rooftops when we discover something worth shouting about, and we can reexamine what that value ought to be. We can look for the quiet art, the modest art; art that doesn’t boil, but gently simmers.
We have to choose to reject a lot of notions that the influencers of consumerism press onto us, to include the arbitrary and restrictive distinction between high and low art. Subjectively, those categories might exist, but the decision between them is not a binary; it isn’t a matter of paper bag or tote at the checkout counter. There is a scale by which to interrogate one’s taste. Entertainment is not made more or less pleasurable by its mindlessness, like a single dial being turned. Fun can also be thoughtful, refined and poignant. Anyone who says differently is most certainly trying to sell you something.
You are what you choose to do, and the world is what we make it. As Bill Furlong discovers near the end of the novella, these small things, when added up, often amount to a life. Keegan herself is committed to keep writing. Two years ago, she finished her note-taking and began working on a new piece set on the farm where she grew up in Wicklow. It may be 2033 before we ever read it, if we get to read it at all, but if so it will be lean, trimmed to a maximal efficiency, and exactly what she wanted to say.
