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Claire Keegan: "Small Things Like These"

 "Small Things Like These" is an unusual story with links to "Spotlight" and "Philomena." It's about how an entire town can be complicit in the evils of the Catholic Church.


Bill Furlong works with coal, in Ireland, in the 1980s; he delivers coal to various businesses and houses. One of his clients is a local convent, which is also a Magdalene laundry. These laundries existed from the 1700s all the way through the 1990s, in Ireland; unwed mothers were sometimes incarcerated, separated from their children, forced to contribute labor, made to fear early deaths. (Some died very young; infants were also allowed to die.)

Bill visits the convent once and meets a woman who asks to be escorted to the river, "just so I could drown myself." Women plead to know anything about their babies, whom they can't see.

But routines are routines; the laundry does a really nice job with bedclothes and with shirts. Also, it's rumored that the nuns at the laundry hold power over the nuns at the local girls' private school--and if you want to advance in the world, you need to get your daughters into that private school.

This is a horrifying setting, and it yields unforgettable scenes. The Mother Superior warns Bill, indirectly, about holding one's tongue: "It's just that you have five daughters, and I'd hate to see one turned away from the Catholic school..." Bill came from very little, and he worries when his youngest daughter hides away from the local Santa; some people might think this is cute, but Bill sees signs of an impending "failure to thrive." Bill sits with his wife and argues about Margaret Thatcher. "You say people must pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but what if that's not always an option?"

The writer, Claire Keegan, is ambitious and authoritative; it feels like you're watching a documentary film, not reading a novel. The tension builds until the final scene, Bill's last choice, feels thrilling. And the sympathetic portrait of Mrs. Furlong, who is shrewd and small-minded and frightened, stands out (even among other stand-out portraits).

Claire Keegan almost won the Booker Prize for this book, and her next one, also celebrated, will arrive in America later this month.
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