Review by New York Times Review
To assert the timelessness of a writer's work is to invite rebuttal a decade later. The history of literature is, after all, partly a history of trends. Even the language we use to talk about storytelling shifts from era to era. The critics of Flannery O'Connor's day, for instance, fixated on symbolism, and by this metric her stories - the most famous of which depicts a Bible salesman who steals a young woman's prosthesis when she tries to seduce him - were adjudged successful. Very well, the author said. "If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story." She was right. These days only English teachers nearing retirement evaluate literature in terms of symbols, but O'Connor's stories remain finely etched, sardonic marvels in which details like the leg accumulate meaning as the action unfolds. The Irish writer Claire Keegan has named O'Connor as an influence. While the stories in Keegan's new collection, "Walk the Blue Fields," are gentler than O'Connor's work, and deeper than Keegan's angrier and more obvious offerings in her first book, "Antarctica," the best of them display a similar attention to physical and emotional concreteness, whereby the two become blended and magnified. In the title story of "Walk the Blue Fields," a priest catalogs the evidence of a bride's uncertainty on her wedding day: the light, shaky signature in the register; the trembling of her bouquet; the tears she is too proud to blink and let fall. Initially his observations seem a little humdrum, the detached concern of God's celibate emissary. Only when the priest encounters the groom's brother in the bathroom, drunkenly struggling to stuff himself back into rented trousers, do we begin to suspect that desire is the source of the priest's heightened sensitivity. As the priest flees the room, some of the men laugh. "There was a time, not too long ago," the priest reflects, "when they would have waited until he could not have heard." Keegan's writing is delicate: not prudish, but exact She understands that in life and in art the power of sexual urges lies in their shocking contrast with the mundane. The brother's body - and the thoughts it conjures of the groom's - operates much like O'Connor's wooden leg. There is the thing itself, and there is the way it illuminates the priest's lonely situation. In another standout story, "The Forester's Daughter," a woman marries a selfish man, thinking he loves her and in the hope that she will grow to love him. She realizes her mistake when he castigates her for squandering "my money on roses." Already pregnant by then, she stays, casually raising their first child and then the ones that follow. Flowers and storytelling are the two pleasures she allows herself in this airless, loveless existence, and when she finally exacts revenge on her husband, it is by telling the story of how she came to buy the roses and what, both psychologically and literally, they mean for her. Not all the stories in "Walk the Blue Fields" are so rich. A few are heavy-handed parables. A story about a writer who resents an interruption of her residency at Heinrich Böll's former home is well written but so slight that it would have been better omitted. Still, the best stories here are so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it's easy to imagine readers savoring them many years from now. And to imagine critics, far in the future, deploying lofty new terms to explain what it is that makes Keegan's fiction work. Maud Newton writes about books and other matters at MaudNewton.com.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Seven foreboding tales from Keegan (Antarctica) examine family, buried secrets and forbidden love in contemporary rural Ireland. In the title story, a priest questions his calling as he performs the wedding ceremony of a girl he once loved; after marrying her off to a lesser man, laments that "two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life." "The Forester's Daughter" follows a tragic chain of events prompted by a woman who agrees to marry against her better instincts "because if she said no, the question might never be asked of her again." The final and strongest story centers on Margaret Flusk, a superstitious woman retreating from a personal tragedy into the farmhouse of her recently deceased cousin, who was a priest, and with whom she shared an abiding love. Word of her mysterious ability to heal soon gets out to the parish, breaking her isolation decisively. The more whimsical narratives fall a little flat (they're also brief), but in the longer, stronger pieces, Keegan's poetic prose, spot-on dialogue and well paced plot twists keep the pages turning through sadness, grief, rage and compromise. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Acclaimed Irish author Keegan, whose Antarctica won a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year award, returns with a new collection. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
