So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan: A mini masterpiece about subtly toxic masculinity

Following on from 2021′s Booker-nominated Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan returns with So Late in the Day, a stand-alone story about a man, Cathal, struggling to recognise how his low-level misogyny has cost him the only relationship that held the promise of a happier future.

The understated virtuosity of this story lies in the characteristic subtlety with which Keegan inhabits her protagonist’s emotional illiteracy, his need to neutralise or redirect feelings of shame and regret too powerful to be borne. Cathal’s sexism is marked not by overt animosity, but by almost innocuous assumptions about how women should accommodate themselves to his needs that accumulate into a kind of mean entitlement.

So Late in the Day displays Keegan’s genius for conjuring up a richly realised social world governed by unspoken values and behavioural norms that powerfully channel individuals’ lives into more arid paths. Also on display is Keegan’s gift for dialogue, her ability to capture both the banalities of everyday speech and the way seemingly casual conversations become laden with deeper meanings, only dimly understood.

[ Claire Keegan interview: ‘I don’t come from a close family. We are not close at all’ ]

There is nothing demonstrative about this prose, which is not spare but restrained, strategically discharging touches of eloquence only when needed, and not through a profusion of descriptive detail, but through choice adjectives and verbs that just stray from the literal. We read of the taste of cut grass floating through a window, a plate holding on to a counter, and flowers plump in their bed.

‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’

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If this story has a fault, it is its moral certainty and predictability. Just as Small Things Like These straightforwardly critiques social complicity in institutional abuse, So Late in the Day never moves out of the comfort zone of condemning the deadening effect of misogyny on men and women alike. It is telling that the French translation of So Late in the Day is simply titled Misogynie.

Readers are being treated to a litany of miniature masterpieces from writers pushing the form of the short story and novella to new artistic heights. If Keegan’s fiction lacks the stylistic flair of a Max Porter or the philosophical depth of a Jon Fosse, as a portraitist of how human beings and their intimate relationships are shaped by the social worlds they inhabit, Keegan stands almost without rival.