So Late in the Day
This is a public note. It contains spoilers. It is fully my opinion that good stories do not rely on the unknown to keep the reader engaged, so I've not attempted to hide things, nor have I attempted to reveal things. I've tried to capture the details I find necessary to describe the book and my thoughts on it.
So Late in the Day is a collection of three short stories by Claire Keegan. As is true of nearly all literary authors, Claire Keegan's writing is bleak; her stories include:
- A man, living through what should have been his wedding day, reflecting on the monster his fiance eventually saw him as and in doing so, becoming that monster
- A writer and her bitter inquisitor, who knows both heritage and ceremony and dispatches one in favor of the other, and then is dispatched himself by the author in her stories
- A woman, eager to taste a different life, goes shopping for her family and comes to regret her decisions
The final story is by far the most bleak, and without saying more, I almost regret reading it--and recommend most skip it. Not because it is bad writing, but because it, like so many well described atrocities, burns itself into memory, and now I cannot shake it out.
Otherwise, each story plays out an interaction between men and women, and in all of them, the ability to let go or hang on, and through that an insight into what we choose to let go of and hang on to, how those decisions persist, and so, in some way, so do even the things we let go of--sometimes to disastrous effect.
Claire Keegan has a mastery of describing not only the bleakness of living, but also the bleakness of even an inviting landscape. Her stories are to the point; only a few times did I feel bombarded by an adverb or adjective that felt unnecessary, a writing style that I personally feel is the height of language mastery--terse and packed with enough meaning to be both prose and poetry. I collected this book because, around Christmas of 2023, I read some glowing reviews of her writing, and she did not disappoint.
As wholly another matter, So Late in the Day gives me some hope that I might be able to publish my own small collection of short stories.