‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan   (2023)  –  118 pages

Note that the subtitle of this collection of three stories is “Stories of Women and Men”, not “Stories of Men and Women”. In each of these stories, the woman is the main protagonist and the man plays a peripheral though critical part. “Critical” is the operative word here.

“That was the problem with women falling out of love; the veil of romance fell away from their eyes, and they looked in and could read you.

But this one didn’t stop there.”

The man can only react to the woman’s lessened opinion of him.

“He had looked at her then and again saw something ugly about himself reflected back at him, in her gaze.”

The second story has a nice twist to it, a female writer retaliating. She is staying at the Boll House, the former home of the famous German author Heinrich Boll on Achill Island, to work on her new story. Heinrich Boll’s family left this house as a working residence for writers.

A German literary professor visits her at the house and she hopes he won’t interfere with her writing progress, However it turns out that he has been spying on her and is highly critical of her.

“You come to this house of Heinrich Boll and make cakes and go swimming with no clothes on.”

Our woman writer retaliates the best way she knows how. She puts him in her story and gives him “the long and painful death” in the story, which is the story title.

The first lines of the last story, “Antarctica”, are :

“Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out.”

I doubt there are very many readers who could stop reading after those opening sentences

It’s proving very difficult to criticize anything Claire Keegan writes, and I am not going to do it. These three stories are all fine. This is a very quick lively read.

Grade:   A