Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
A review of Claire Keegan’s novella about decency tested against stability and social silence.
70 pages · Kindle edition · Grove Press, 2021
The Cost of Decency
In Small Things Like These, bravery arrives late and without safety. Claire Keegan strips it of uplift and moral theatre. What remains is a decision that threatens livelihood, family and standing, taken without reassurance.
Bill Furlong is settled, tired, respectable. His life runs on repetition: work, home, weather, routine. That steadiness matters. The risk he takes is not symbolic. It comes with dependants and consequences that will not fall on him alone.
The book narrows the space for action. There is no exposure or public reckoning. Only a moment when continuing as before becomes impossible. The town survives through managed silence. Everyone knows enough. No one presses further.
Furlong’s wife voices the prevailing logic. Protect what you have. Do not invite scrutiny. The nuns are charitable. The girls are wayward. Her position is coherent and socially functional. Keegan makes it persuasive.
The conflict is not goodness versus cruelty. It is decency set against stability. Choosing the former fractures the arrangements that keep life workable.
Keegan’s prose compresses rather than urges. Cold, labour and small observation do the work. The novella’s tight length mirrors the narrow margin within which moral action exists.
What lingers is the cost. As Keegan writes:
“Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.” The act does not close the wound it opens. It leaves life unsettled, arrangements broken, and consequences unresolved. This is what courage looks like once stability has been built.