Claire Keegan
So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men is a collection of three stories by Claire Keegan all of which illustrate manifestations and degrees of male misogynism.
The first story, “So Late in the Day,” recounts a day in the life of Cathal, a Dublin office worker. He is upset, distracted, uncomfortable around people, and avoids interaction. He returns to an empty home because his fiancé has moved out. He flashes back to past interactions with his girlfriend, including his awkward proposal of marriage. But it is not until he flashes even further back in time to an ugly incident at the breakfast table with his parents and sibling that we learn the full extent of his misogyny and, more importantly, where he learned it.
In “The Long and Painful Death” a female writer has been awarded a two-week residency in Henrich Böll’s house on Achill Island. She is looking forward to having uninterrupted time to write. But on her first day, she receives a phone call from a German professor of literature who happens to be standing outside the house. He asks to be allowed in to view the house. Reluctantly, she agrees to his request but asks him to come back in the evening. He arrives at the appointed time, shows little interest in seeing the house, enjoys the refreshments she has provided, and then proceeds to spew verbal venom at her. After he leaves, she turns the unpleasant incident into material for her story.
“Antarctica” is the final and most disturbing story. A married woman wants to experiment by sleeping with a man other than her husband. On a Christmas shopping excursion, she meets a man in a bar and spends the night with him. When she goes back to her hotel room the next morning to collect her bags and catch the train home, he shows up and convinces her to come back to his place with the promise to take her to the train station later. To the reader’s horror, she agrees.
Keegan peppers her stories with clues about her male characters’ misogyny even though the female characters initially excuse them. Cathal’s fiancé forgives his patronizing, demeaning attitude until she’s had enough of his nonsense. The female writer accommodates the male professor’s assumption that he can invade her time and space at his whim. She throws him out when his anger and resentment surface. The married woman, eager to experience an adventure, is completely oblivious to the dangerous situation she has got herself in until it is too late for her to do anything about it.
Keegan is proficient in writing prose that is subtle and spare. She builds up the tension almost imperceptibly. She manages to create an ominous undercurrent in her stories that the reader senses long before her female characters do. Her mastery use of detail serves to contrast women’s expectations of independence and equality with men’s patriarchal expectations of female subservience and compliance. There is a haunting quality about her writing that lingers long after her stories end.