Claire Keegan: ‘I can’t explain my work. I just write stories’

Claire Keegan’s five books to date run to just 700 pages and some 140,000 words. “I love to see prose being written economically,” she tells me. “Elegance is saying just enough. And I do believe that the reader completes the story.” Revered by critics and prize judges for the miraculous density of her short fiction ever since her 1999 debut, Antarctica, she became an international bestseller two years ago with her first novel, Small Things Like These, about an Irish coal merchant whose eyes are opened one Christmas to the horror behind the walls of his biggest customer, a laundry run by nuns. “I think the book was taking off before it was shortlisted for the Booker prize,” Keegan, speaking from her home on the Wexford coast after technology thwarts our planned video call. “A lot of the sales went through word of mouth. A lot of people bought the book for other people for Christmas. People read it and bought it for other people in the new year. Now it’s on the school syllabus here.”

The novel, which won last year’s Orwell prize for political fiction, takes its epigraph from the 1916 proclamation of the Irish republic, pledging “equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens”, a damning prelude to a book about systematised misogyny. Keegan’s new book, So Late in the Day, a 64-page story published as a standalone hardback, examines the theme from another angle. It follows Cathal, a civil servant clock-watching his way through the remaining desk hours of a sunny summer Friday in modern Dublin. Something is off – why won’t he look at his phone? – but what, we can’t tell, until his mind replays a disagreement with his ex-fiancee, Sabine, a French gallery worker, about what men – specifically, Irish men – want from women.

An understated cousin to Kristen Roupenian’s dating horror, Cat Person (which likewise first appeared in the New Yorker), So Late in the Day began life around a decade ago, devised by Keegan – a teacher of creative writing for 30 years – as a way to show her students how fiction can be tense without being dramatic. “I just went to the board in class and drew out a version of the story, which I made up as I went along, about a man who goes to the office and it’s Friday evening and he gets off work and catches the bus home. Then a few things happen to him which seem to be undramatic, and actually are, if you’re looking at them from outside. But for him they’re moments of tension, and the tension reveals his loss.” One day a student asked if she had actually written it. “The way she asked made me believe that she was going to write it; I thought, I’d better write that story.”

Keegan didn’t rush – Small Things Like These came first – and she says she’s never tried to write quickly; tellingly, she speaks not of completing a manuscript but of getting “the text right”. Even more than her other work, So Late in the Day deploys her typically hushed technique to devastating effect; plain sentences unfurl their full implication only on rereading, the narration a veiled disclosure of the protagonist’s poisonous habits of thought. From the opening (“On Friday, July 29th, Dublin got the weather that was forecast”), to Cathal’s memory of the “long shower” that Sabine took when she moved into his home (before drinking a “full litre of Evian” over takeaway “which he’d had to order”), little is incidental, least of all Cathal’s stifled impulse on taking a seat beside a chatty grandmother on the bus home: “He wished she would stay quiet – then caught himself.”

All the story’s subterranean turmoil plays out in that one line, yet the first-time reader can’t quite gauge how – still less detect its glint of hope for Cathal’s future in a tale otherwise void of comfort by the end. “I do think no story has ever been read properly unless it’s read twice. So it’s a longer book, you see, than you think it is, because it needs to be read twice. Double the pages,” says Keegan, with a laugh.

Raised on a farm in Wicklow, she became the first in her family to go to university when, as a teenager in the 1980s, tired (she once said) of being “a second-class citizen” on account of her gender, she left to study politics in New Orleans. That she ended up studying literature there, too, was down to Mary McCay, an inspirational lecturer who took “all pretension and academia out of the subject” (she’s a dedicatee of Small Things Like These). “There was no right answer all of a sudden. You could just explore the stories and what they meant and how they reached what they reached into. It was very much up to you to decide what you saw there. I loved the freedom of that.”

For Keegan, now in her mid-50s, it’s a liberty she’s keen to preserve, both for her readers but also herself, you feel. “I can’t explain my work,” she tells me. “I just write stories. I’ve never thought about a theme. I never once have. I just think about the text.” To compare the New Yorker version of So Late in the Day with the one in the book is to witness how carefully Keegan thinks about text, her tweaks and tightenings a masterclass in craft and nuance. I ask about what feels to me the farthest-reaching change, which snuffs out a rare ray of light near the end. In the magazine version, Cathal’s brother messages: “You OK?” Now his text reads: “Your better off without that French hoor”. “I simply thought these were better word choices. These words seemed more revealing, more accurate,” says Keegan.

Not for nothing was the story previously published in French under the title Misogynie. George Saunders, for whom Keegan is “one of the greatest fiction writers in the world”, recently chose it when he was invited to pick a favourite New Yorker story to discuss on the magazine’s podcast, but he balked at reading it aloud – his duty as guest – because he didn’t want to say “cunt”, a word the story repeats to increasing impact. Keegan (who read the story herself, with riveting poise) tells me she respects his reluctance “even though he considered it to be the perfect word – as I do. It’s what Irish men often call women here. Writing the language people use is part of what a writer does to portray the lives we lead, the world we live in.”

Keegan speaks of her protagonist with weary distaste. “He’s very tight with money. He’s mean. He’s not going to be able to look at the past and face things. He turns his back on it. He’s just so dishonest. He lies to himself. He’s a piece of work,” she says. But she demurs when I describe So Late in the Day as an indictment. “I don’t believe a well-considered story indicts any of its characters or has any type of agenda. I long ago took the great advice Chekhov gave in one of his letters, to ‘write coolly’. The truth is in the middle.”

Related: Claire Keegan wins Orwell prize for novel about 1980s Ireland

Next year comes a film of Small Things Like These starring Cillian Murphy; Keegan is staying out of it. “That’s my preference – to not hover over anybody else’s work and let them do what they need to do and have their own vision.” She has her own work – a new novel, set on the farm where she grew up. Having once described it as “a mother’s story”, she now sounds undecided. “I am really hoping that the point of view doesn’t change to a man’s point of view, simply because I was a coal man, and then I had to be a dull civil servant working in Dublin and going home on the bus, a misogynist who is mean. It would just be nice to be female; even just to describe putting on a pair of tights and getting into a pair of heels might be a nice change.” She’s joking, of course; that isn’t how Keegan operates. “If the book turns out to be about a farmer and his brother farmer and their third brother farmer, and there’s no women in the house, then that is the book that I will write. I don’t know that you really do get to choose.”

• So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan is published by Faber (£8.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply