![]() The plot follows Bill Furlong, a New Ross family man and merchant who is troubled as he becomes aware of what occurs in the local Magdalen laundry. Yet the subject of the novel is often painful. ![]() Keegan’s short novel, which could just as well be called a long short story, is stylistically lovely and imbued with her passion for seeing. ![]() In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before disappearing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. When she was a teenager, Joan Didion studied the opening to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a paragraph of “four deceptively simple sentences, 126 words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them.” A young writer today could study with similar pleasure the opening paragraph of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a novel set in a 20th century town that includes a Magdalen laundry, one of Ireland’s imprisoning institutions for unwed mothers: ![]()
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