Book Talk, Prompt, and Poem
Going In, Not On, with Claire Keegan
“Bad story tellers, bad conversationalists go on and on,” the great Claire Keegan once said while in conversation with Colm Toibin. “I always think of Larkin, who said, ‘Why do people thinking adding was increase, to me it was dilution.’ In the state of going in, more is added. I try not to add more, but to go in farther into what I’ve chosen.”
Keegan was referring, as she spoke to Toibin, about her use of cold in the pristine novella Small Things Like These. But I like to draw my eye toward her use of heat in that same story—the ways in which warmth and fire and simmer present a through-line in this story of an Irish coal merchant confronted with a haunting moral dilemma.
The heat is there in the opening paragraph: “In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays.”
It is there a few pages later—“His earliest memories were of serving plates, a black range—hot! Hot!—and a shining floor of square tiles.”