I use New York Times cooking at least three to four times a week. I love sheet pan bibimbap. It said 35 minutes. It was 35 minutes. The cucumber salad with soy, ginger, and garlic. Oh my God, that is just to die for. This turkey chili has over 17,000 five-star ratings. So easy, so delicious. The instructions are so clear, so simple. and it just works. Hey, it's Eric Kim from New York Times Cooking.
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. The holidays are nigh, and this is our last new episode of the year. We're going to take a very brief break for Christmas. and for New Year's, and we'll see you on the other side. Before that, however, we have our final book club episode of the year. I'm going to let our host, MJ Franklin, tell you all about it.
Hello, and welcome to another Book Club episode of the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review. And for this month's Book Review Book Club, we're talking about small things like these. Claire Keegan's 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season. It's a slim book, just over 100 pretty small pages with large margins, but...
It's a thought-provoking one, and one that really seems to have secured a spot in the public imagination. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and earlier this year it was made into a movie starring Cillian Murphy. So, we thought... A book that is seasonal, a book that is adapted, and a book that is getting accolades is the perfect book for a book club discussion.
And joining me in discussing the novel are a handful of my wonderful colleagues. First, we have a voice you may not have heard on the show in a while, Liz Egan. Liz was last on the book club in February for our Demon Copperhead conversation. Welcome back, Liz. Hi, MJ. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And Liz, in the intervening months...
Your job has changed. You were previously a review editor and now you're a features writer, correct? I am indeed. I wanted to bring this up because I want listeners to know. Liz has written a ton of incredible features about some really remarkable books over the year. So if you're looking for some literary delights, please go check out Liz's author page. It's fantastic. Thank you, MJ. Next with us is Jumana Khatib, a staff editor here at The Book Review.
Shimona needs no introduction. She's a frequent book clubber. She's frequently on the podcast. You were here last talking about the best books of 2024? Yes. Feels like just yesterday. Just yesterday. That was so much fun. Thank you for coming back. You had a good time. We did. Jumona, one additional thing I wanted to flag about you is that you recently reviewed The History of the Big House by Sharif Magdalene, correct?
Yeah, it was. I'm always aware that I don't want to just log the homeland too much, but he is like probably one of the best Lebanese novelists we have working now. So that was a real treat. And Lauren assigned it to me. Oh, my God. It's so beautiful. Look at the mafia here in full. fledged form and nj and i sit next to each other this is a very close group and lauren sits behind me i'm the hub okay features writer and speaking of
Lauren, last but not least, we have Lauren Christensen, another staff editor here at The Book Review. Lauren, you were last here for our conversation about The Hypocrite by Joe Hamia. Welcome back. Thank you so much. shouting everyone's praises. Lauren, you also wrote a really cool piece, which was you rounded up the best audiobooks of 2024. I did, yes.
I feel like that's especially relevant to this audience of book clubbers. This is a list of the best audio literary content that you can listen to. And the audiobook for this book that we are book clubbing is also excellent. So quick plug. So this is Odyssey. One, thank you all for being here. And listeners, we have an expert panel to talk about this book, Small Things Like These. And before we dive into the book, I just want to share some admin notes up top.
One, at the end of the episode, we will reveal our January 2025 book club book. So stay with us if you want to find out what we're reading next. And second, there will be spoilers in this conversation. It's a book club. You want to dive in. If you want to avoid spoilers, go read this book. It's really short, so you can do it in no time and then come back and listen. And if you've already read it or don't care about spoilers, let's dive in. And to set the table, I just want to ask...
Can someone give us a brief elevator pitch synopsis of Small Things Like These? What is this book about? I would be happy to tell you guys. Small Things Like These is about a man named Bill Furlong. who is a father of five and a coal man in a small town in rural Ireland. And the story, the book unfolds in the months leading up. Christmas. And as the seasons change, so does his perspective on the world around him. This has helped along by finding a young girl.
locked in a coal shed at the convent next door to his daughter's school. The convent turns out to be one of the infamous mother and baby homes, also known as a Magdalene Laundry. And he cannot shake the view of this young girl and her desperation and her missing of her 14-month-old son. And what he learns about her life changes the way he sees both his past and his present. And it helps him to reevaluate his future. So this is a Christmas.
novella, but it's really deep. And the tension is this crisis of morality, of conscience, of community. I want to throw it out to the table. What did you think of this book? Like it, love it, hate it, feel complicated about it. I just want to hear your top level thoughts. Yeah, I first read it, I believe in a galley form when it hadn't come out yet just to with an eye to assign it for a review. And I had not heard of Claire Keegan before. I guess this was 20.
21 or sometime in the pandemic, I remember. And I'm reading it in a PDF and I have no idea what to expect. And I just remember this intense trance. It's the kind of book that you can read. really quickly, but it actually rewards really slow reading, possibly multiple readings. I think you just, you go back and it's not like Easter eggs of information. It's just that every...
And you mentioned it's only about 100 pages. Every sentence is doing so much work. It feels like there's so many sentences and images contained in each very economical phrase. And I found that just so rewarding on a... written level I think it is a Christmas story I think what's really striking to me is the kind of interplay in this book between the kind of grind and the horrors of a capitalist
structure of society, the interplay between that and a real kind of inherent humanism that Bill Furlong has. Can I ask a follow-up question, which is... You mentioned feeling this trance and that feels especially notable to me because as editors, we're reading in such atypical ways. We're reading PDFs in advance. We have no context frequently going in and we have to read fast.
So for something to really hook you, he was notable. Did you know when you were first reading it in that weird experience that this book would become this force that it's become since it published? Could you feel that? Could you predict that? That's such a hard question. No, I mean, not. I mean, I think it has every marking, this book, of just a kind of quietly powerful literary.
novel, the kind of book that just lives on a shelf somewhere for the right person to go find it and be totally moved by it. I think the fact that it has earned so much critical and popular acclaim is exciting to us as book people that like, we're happy for everything that's on the bestseller list. But I think especially when it's something we are so personally passionate about, it's so rewarding.
Yeah. I'm so excited for her. For what seems like a hidden gem to get its flowers. Yeah. There's nothing better. Yeah. What about everyone else? How did you feel about this book? I managed to sort of avoid. Clara Keegan mania until this book club and I was I'm glad she's there she's scratching the itch for the right reader that's a wonderful thing but then I read this and I was like god this is a like
beautifully constructed book. This is going to sound like a bit of an oxymoron because it's not a book that's... obviously has a lot of ornament. It's an unbelievably restrained book and it actually has the feeling of being something that's been distilled and distilled to the point that like every single even punctuation mark is there for a reason.
And I can tell how hard she worked on this. And that also makes me respect it so much. I read this basically in one sitting and it was completely beautiful. And I loved the scope of it. I loved. how clear the moral of it was too.
I actually don't know the last time that I feel like I've come on here in praise of ambiguity. Actually, when we were like doing our hypocrite book club and we're like, isn't it wonderful to find a grace face? And now I'm here and I'm like, isn't it wonderful to find a man that does the right thing? So ask me next. I don't know. Maybe Christmas has me in a mood. I don't know. I do not like ambiguity as everybody sitting at this table knows. I prefer clarity. I don't like coyness in a book.
I don't like, I'm too cool to show my emotions in a book. And what I loved about this book, Jumana, this might be like one of the rare overlaps of our Venn diagrams. First of all, I think it's worth saying for anybody who... has never seen a physical copy of small things like these. It's a beautiful, almost pocket-sized book. It's not your average trim size and it has a beautiful cover.
Whoever decided to publish this book in this format deserves a special award of their own because it's so beautiful. I encountered it at the cash register at my local bookstore. The year it came out, I think I was looking for a one last Christmas present, maybe even a stocking stuffer for somebody. And I just threw it into my purchase and was shocked by. both how sad it is but also how much beauty it has in it and also alongside the sorrow joy it has a lot of dramatic
It has a lot of dramatic tension, but not a lot of drama. It's very soft spoken. and restrained. I think that's a perfect way to put it. And I actually was thinking about that, the tension between drama and tension. It's not a dramatic book, but it is tense, right? And even just thinking about the title, small things like these. Like that line comes from a conversation Bill and Eileen are having in bed, right? Where she's downloading him on the latest.
news in town and I think somebody has a cancer diagnosis and it's just life grinds on and it's oh yeah small things like these but then it turns out to have such a bigger resonance when you think about the bigger universe that he lives in. Quick introduction, Eileen is Bill's wife. I think we've mentioned her, but we haven't introduced her. I would actually argue that it is a dramatic book. There's a whole revelation about who this man's...
father was. He has unknown on his birth certificate in the place where his father's name should be. And he solves that mystery partway through the book. And of course, the whole, the center of this book, the kind of him stumbling upon this. place of real suffering at the hands of the Catholic Church, that what could be a more dramatic discovery, but there's this restraint in the delivery of it, in the addressing it, not wanting to look those things head on. And that is embedded in the whole.
point of the book and of Christmas, right, of just this is a time to be happy and to think about and to give and receive Christmas gifts and to think about how lucky we are to have our families. And then but and that's wonderful. But then there's just another. The flip side of that is don't look at the people who are freezing outside. I also think that she, Claire Keegan, has such an amazing handle on how to imbue moments with...
They never felt heavy handed. So it's probably worth getting into Bill's backstory, right? Because he was born out of wedlock to a young mother and his mother was working as a maid for... wealthy widow in town with a big estate. Her name was Mrs. Wilson. And actually that estate and that upbringing gave Bill a bit of a shelter or a bit of a buffer from the shame because...
I think that his mother's parents basically dropped her when they figured out she was pregnant. But Mrs. Wilson was like, you can stay here, obviously, and really allowed there to be a haven for this boy. And there's a moment where. He won a spelling bee because she gave him a dictionary. Mrs. Wilson gave him a dictionary. And in that moment, he comes home and tells her the news. And he says she rubbed his hair.
And he could feel the pride. And for a moment, he felt like a child who mattered. My God. Devastated. Can I also bring in, perhaps because I just watched. Say Nothing, the TV adaptation. So the Catholic Protestant backstory is on my mind. So this book takes place in 85. So midway through the troubles, a little bit after the scope of Say Nothing. But anyway, it's just fresh in my mind. And my eyes were just...
really zeroing in on the fact that Mrs. Wilson, who does take in Bill Furlong's mother, Bill Furlong is Catholic. Mrs. Wilson is Protestant and she... It is very connected to the fact that she has the money to take him in and to care for him and to raise him as her own. And there's, I'm also going to push back a little bit on the idea that there, because there is a moment of real moral ambiguity in this. And I think that's in Eileen.
She wants her husband to spend money on the girls and to spend money on her and to keep quiet about what's going on at the laundries. But then there's this moment where a really subtle conflict between the two, between the married couple. And she says, you know how a woman finds herself in that situation, hinting at his mother. And he steps back. And then at a certain point, Eileen makes the point, we don't have the luxury.
to be able to, we Catholic women don't have the luxury to be able to take in, to extend kindness, that actually selflessness is a privilege of people who. have the ability to give things away. So that did not redeem her, but there was a depth to Eileen's role in this book beyond just pushing against Bill Furlong's like naive kind of kindness. For me, I also think there was a moral ambiguity here because...
Everyone is just trying to survive. And I initially wanted to say there are no heroes or villains here, but that's not true. I think Bill is clearly a hero, but there are no villains here because people, again, are just trying to get by in whatever way they can. And you do see the... level of need of eileen and their family and bill is
going throughout the town and he's like a modern flaneur in a kind of way. He's walking around, he's doing cold deliveries and just seeing the way people live around town and he's seeing their level of need too. And so...
Yes, there technically are villains. There is horrible abuse happening. So maybe I take that back as well. But there's a sense that Eileen, for instance, even though she, as I'm just repeating what you said, Lauren, even though she is more hesitant to help, it's not because she just.
as evil in her heart, but she's thinking of her girls. How are we going to get by? How are we going to, we need the assistance that this church has to offer. I was also really struck by Mrs. Keogh, who was the woman who works in the local pub. After Bill discovers what's actually happening in the convent that really looms over the town and is really beautiful and people look at it as if it's a Christmas card view, he's talking to...
to Mrs. Keogh, who says, I understand you had a run-in at the convent. And he allows that he has. And she says, just remember that building is only separated. by one wall from St. Margaret's, which is the school that his daughters go to. And at least once, I think twice in the book. Claire Keegan makes it clear that St. Margaret's is the only school for girls in town that is really training girls to be smart and capable. And because Bill has a slightly precarious toehold.
in the place in society where he is and he's really built that world himself. He is very worried. You can sense his worry about losing a spot for his girls at this school. But at the same time, he also takes the opportunity to gently push the envelope with her because she says, basically, she's saying this is all one church that's in charge of all this stuff. And they have their fingers in every pie. So basically saying they've got a lot of power.
And he pushes back and he goes, surely they only have as much power as we give them, right? And so they end in a bit of a stalemate. But part of, I think, his ability to understand what's going on is because he's... He's on the margins, right? And because he's traveling around and he sees everything and that's what allows him to get at that stuff. I would also argue that it's because of his...
This all starts with this incredibly bitterly cold winter where people cannot get enough coal fast enough. And so he is his service is in high demand. So there's this actually really interesting juxtaposition of these like. essential services that the church provides and that Bill Furlong is providing and how in this moment they do come head to head. And those power dynamics are so interesting. And also the time that he...
goes to the convent and actually discovers the girl he ends up saving. Her name is Sarah. In that horrible scene where the nuns are pretending that she's not.
being held captive and everyone knows it's this sham and it's so excruciating to witness. In that moment, the nuns hand him a check, like a Christmas gift. And he... takes it and he brings it home and he's I don't even want why am I taking this check and but the money exchanges hands and it's not even for the coal that he's provided it's just a
Christmas gift. But then also Eileen is expecting it. She's, did they do this this year? And you get the sense that I can take this to the butcher. And also just like where it's, oh, this is going to pay the butcher bill. Whoa. And then it's funny that you talk about.
Making the comparison between the coal and the church. I didn't grow up religious, but the coal man is not just like the guy bringing coal. It's also warmth, illumination, comfort, like all this stuff that you actually need to get through a winter or like. a cold snap. And like, theoretically, I think the church should provide the same stuff, comfort, spiritual illumination, warmth in very trying times. And so that contrast.
Can I do a slight pivot and just ask, how much did you know about the Magdalene Laundries before reading this book? Because I will confess, I knew nothing about it. I don't think they even say Magdalene Laundries in the book itself. I found out from a review. At the end of the book. It's in the dedication. Yeah, that's all. So how much should you all know? I knew...
So I had I'm going to shout out one of my favorite professors, Kim McMullen, who could never pronounce my name, but she was amazing on Irish literature. And we spent a lot of time on the laundries and just like. the ramifications of what that means for the Irish canon, where it's we're setting these girls to work to like clean out everybody else's stains. So they're irredeemable. So that is huge. But Liz, you're the expert. Yeah, I know a lot about it. I have an aunt who was in...
one of them, but she's no longer with us. She was my grandmother's sister. And we found out in 2003. 2002 or 2003, long after my grandmother died, she had emigrated to this country. And our family always wondered why she never wanted to go back to Ireland in addition to not having a ton of money. But she was really never interested in where she never talked much about where she came from. And after she died, this man contacted our family and said that he was the son of...
He was my dad's first cousin. And it turned out my grandmother had gone back to Ireland one time, which was to pay the bounty to get her sister out of this home. And she had been with her son until he was two and a half years old. That was very customary. You would care for your kid till they were a toddler and then they would be adopted.
Wow. So he was actually returned to the nuns. He wasn't even raised by the family. A lot of the children didn't survive, right? Right. Actually, I believe the one that my aunt was in was the one where I think 740 dead. babies were found in the yard. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I've read everything there is. So for you, Jumana and Liz, since you did know about the laundries, how did this book render that history?
Did it illuminate anything? I'm just curious about anyone who has knowledge of this, how they approach this book. You can hear like Lauren and I guess, God, like hundreds of babies found at one facility.
With the distance of time, you have the benefit of being able to be horrified in real time because we know so much more now than when it was going on. But I think the value of a book like this is that... you see how easily this stuff can go on in plain sight and is a shared complicity with everybody in the town to keep it going and how it actually just, like, you see how it happened. From the distance of time, you're like...
This is awful. This is heartbreaking. This is an epidemic. But when you read this and you're like, oh, this is how this happens for decades. To call myself out earlier, I was like, everyone's just trying to survive. And while that's true, that also that's the dilemma of this book. How do you survive? Well, also.
being on the right side of history and being morally good and helping others in need. That's the dilemma that Bill is facing. That's what he's thinking through. And that's what I think this book is fantastic at illuminating. What about you, Liz? How did you feel about how this book approached that history? I thought it handled it so gracefully. I mean, the first time the Magdalene Laundries landed on my radar was in, I think, 2002. There was a movie that came out.
called The Magdalene Laundries. And it really just hit you over the head with what had happened and all the abuse that went on there. And at the end, there were like five minutes of names rolling up the screen. And I love this book because it gets at what I think is a really essential moral question, whether it's with any atrocity that happens anywhere, that so often...
everybody knows and chooses to look the other way. And I think that makes for some of the best fiction, the idea of what we know and we choose not to see. And that's, I think, what Claire Keegan is getting at.
For me, it just keeps coming back to, what I keep thinking about is how expansive that consideration is, how expansive these characters feel and the scene setting of this book feels. For a book that, again, is... so spare i love this book because i feel like there's a rich world that claire keegan has considered i think of it like sculpture almost or i guess like chiseling it's like the great
roman status like there's a giant block and that is life and history and culture and all of this stuff and claire keegan has just immaculately chiseled away without necessarily removing anything that shouldn't go but she's just perfected and fine-tuned and created this brief spare powerful work of art about out of something that is so humongous this actually reminds me
The poet Ilya Kaminsky shared this beautiful nugget from a census survey from like the 20s. And the guy, his occupation, he listed it as carver of stone lions. And then it was like. describe what you do. And he goes, I chip away at all stone, which is not lion. Okay. Amazing. Like I would love to find him, but also.
his book is. There is not, there's nothing in here that's not stone lions. I think also that's a perfect. Yeah, you pivot. Yeah, you're a real pro. You try and pivot off that. I just want to say, I think Ilya Kaminsky is an incredible poet and Paris so nicely. with this book too i'm googling furiously a poem of his we lived happily during the war which was he has a quote in it in the street of money in the city of money and the country of money our great country of money we
forgive us, lived happily during the war. That's the dilemma here. There's an atrocity happening and people are trying to live happily, but there's an indictment there to that as well. I don't know. This is all to say... Love Elia Kaminsky and I'm glad you brought her into this conversation. I love this. This conversation is so fun and robust and we're going to dig in more, but first we should take a quick break.
My name's Hannah Dreyer. I'm an investigative reporter at The New York Times. So much of my process is challenging my own assumptions and trying to uncover new information that often goes against what I thought I would find. All of my reporting comes from going out, seeing something, and realizing, oh, that's actually the story. And that reporting helps readers challenge their own assumptions and come to new conclusions for themselves.
This kind of journalism takes resources. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of reporting trips. If you believe that that kind of work is important, you can support it by subscribing to The New York Times. And we're back. I'm MJ Franklin, an editor here at the New York Times Book Review. I'm here with Lauren Christensen, Liz Egan, and Jumana Khatib. And we are talking about small things like these by Claire Keegan.
This is all a heavy topic that we've been getting into, but now I just want to do, I feel like I've been throwing various questions out. I want to do what I like to call freeze room. What stands out to you about this book? What do you want to talk about this book? I think there's something about Bill Furlong being... almost the only man in this world of, in these various worlds of women. Like he, in his home, he has a wife and five daughters. He goes to the convent and he feels...
Even when the nuns are pushing back against him, he feels emboldened by the sense that he is, after all, a man among women. There's just this, yes, he is absolutely the hero of this book. I think there's also a little bit of a moment that...
the reader gets of like, how did everybody know and you didn't know? And he did know, but he didn't want to. And he half admits that, right? He half admits that the ordinary part of his brain just does not want to think about this stuff happening. But then there's just this sort of... Eileen, what do you know about what's going on in the laundries? And it's, Bill, what do you know? There's a little bit of that. And it's just, it's interesting to me, this positioning of him as this savior.
on Christmas. It's written by a female author. Like he's coming in and he's literally like sweeping her into his coat, this little girl, and whisking her off into what? That's another thing. We don't know what's going to happen. And it ends on this.
timidly hopeful note of I know trouble lays ahead. I know that basically I know the Catholics are going to come for me. We'll manage. But there are those questions that the reader has of what now? And what about all the other girls? And I don't know. That was a lot of questions to throw out. But I wonder. what first of all i would not want to tangle with eileen and i have a feeling that even though eileen had the steel magnolia vibe to her that she did have a good heart and would open
her soul to another girl at her table. And I did think that Bill and Eileen together would be a formidable wall against whoever comes to their door. I was also curious about because we are talking spoilers, whether or not Bill knew on some level who his father was the whole time. And I was curious about whether you guys thought
I missed it the first time I read it. You did. I am looking at you out. I was like, oh, weird. He looks like him. I think I missed it too. It's Ned. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And who is another person who works in the home of... the woman who raised him. Mrs. Wilson's home and he talks about how Ned polished his shoes and Ned looked out for him and always led him to believe that his father must have been one of the Wilsons because they were fancy and smart. Or one of their guests.
Better stock, basically. Interesting. And in the end, when he goes to visit Ned, who he's heard is sick, the person who answers the door says, oh, Ned isn't here, but oh. How are you related to him? Because you look just like him. And it clicks. Of course, he looks like him. And I think he knew the whole time. And I love that Claire Keegan doesn't tell you because it doesn't really matter. Yeah. I do think there is some element of, I think.
We have such a finely tuned emotional and cerebral connection that like in some ways I've experienced this in my own life. No matter how many times it's shown to me, I won't be able to grasp something until. I am emotionally capable of grasping it. And I think that there's a lot of, because I agree with you, Phil must have known on some level. He's busy. He's busy. He's delivering coal on Sundays. He's so gorgeous. And he must have.
I'm sure the insults and the slurs that he heard growing up, he must have known on some level, just couldn't fully reckon with it. And I think that's another aspect of what makes this a very wise book. I also think that the idea of...
You can only process something, accept something when you're emotionally ready. I think that's where the Christmas season comes into all of this. You can only emotionally accept things on Christmas. It's the Christmas miracle. No, it's that because of Christmas, he's already in this very reflective state of mind.
mind and so it feels like the gates in this particular moment are open and then this tragedy is and now he's just reflecting and I think one of the things I was thinking about is like what I call this a Christmas book I anxiously slacked liz when i after last month's book club where i was like it's a christmas a deep christmas story and i was like is it okay to call it a christmas story because it's so dark and that duality someone mentioned it earlier the duality of how
interior and dark and devastating this book is with the theoretical cheer of the Christmas season is really doing a lot of work in this book. Yeah, but Liz, can I ask you is the... reigning Catholic of the table. Okay. All right. Catholic Emerita. Like what is the relationship between like spirituality and moral responsibility and Christmas? How long is this book club? I guess I'm just asking. Do you have this idea that the Catholics are like, like.
These sort of, they take it seriously. It's not all red doves, reindeer. There's multiple masses on Christmas. All the masses. I'm wondering if there is a more moralistic dimension to what Christmas time means for like such a deeply Catholic society.
I do think that there's a huge piece of it that is about doing unto others as you would have done unto you. But what I really take away from all of it... and I still stand by this, is the idea that it's the season of looking into lit windows as Bill Furlong did on his rounds and on those short days. And being aware of the warmth you have waiting for you at home and your position, everyone's position as an outsider.
of sorts, even if it might look like you're an insider. We all have times where we're the person standing outside in the cold and the dark. And if we're really lucky, we have times of being the person inside the brightly lit window. He describes himself at one point in the book as someone who always stands in doorways. Yes. I loved that sentence. That was an amazing passage. I love that. So there's a literalness to that. But yeah, I mean, he does have a home, but.
Anyway, your description of Christmas just gave me a joke. Oh, really? I'm so glad you could come over, come into my warm window. We'll just stand over here and wave. You can walk inside. You don't have to wait in the doorway. This is why I love a book club. We can start off like, let's talk about a book and then end with Liz personally explained to us.
Tell us about Christmas. I mean, we're going to get some letters if that's, that is not the universal definition of Christmas. I promise. I keep talking about the style and the spareness of the prose. And that's one of the things that impressed me the most about the book is just how, again, she was able to render all of this in such.
concise poetic beautiful sentences um the thing that's been haunting me that i keep thinking about is how much of hemingway i hear in these sentences and specifically the opening and can i read a quote And I also have a Hemingway book with me, A Farewell to Arms. The opening of Small Things Like These is...
In October, there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew and stripped the trees bare. So already I'm interested because it's not just like setting you into Christmas. There is a sense of the decay of fall. Things are dying. The sun is setting. It's becoming more grim. I'm going to skip over some lines. And then the next graph is the people, for the most part, unhappily endured the weather. Shopkeepers and tradesmen.
Men and women in the post office and the dole queue, the mart, the coffee shop, and supermarket, the bingo hall, the pubs, and the chipper all commented in their own ways on the cold and what rain had fallen, asking, what was in it, and could there be something in it? for who could believe that there, again, was another raw cold day. There's a poetry to that. And then in A Farewell to Arms, the opening is...
In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bit of the river, there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.
Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. There's a rhythm and a cadence to it. And maybe I'm thinking about it because there's this great Joan Didion essay in The New Yorker about specifically Hemingway's style and...
how he loved sentences but i read this and immediately thought of hemingway and then i was thinking about i mentioned it before like the flaneur and then there's this history and the remarkable things that clark keegan is able to cram so much into, and I cannot stress this, a 100-page novel. And I noticed as I was reading this time, I think I've read this book every year since it came out. Wow. But it only takes an hour.
What I noticed this time is that she stops short of the corny thing. At one point, she mentions a shooting star. writers of this caliber can get away with a shooting star in a book and not have it be a little hokey but she stops she just walks to the end of the gangplank and stops and it
Not only does she leave you wanting more, but you don't get that sort of, ooh. It's like this parable. It's like this kind of timeless parable that almost, did this hit you guys a little bit when the girls are writing out their... letters to Santa for what they want. One girl wants Levi's 501s because she's seen that those just came out. And I was like, wait, what? Oh yeah. We're not in like biblical times or something.
just universal or biblical or something about this story. And yet so modern. And true, Liz, like your point about sort of just like... her restraint, or I guess we can call it the gangplank if you're going to call it that. But like, it actually has the same effect of forcing the reader to make her own.
to do her own work to meet Claire. Totally. And that actually works in its own way. It's like, now you're complicit in the story too, right? Like you're not ignoring the gaps in this book, of which there are many. I think that's why readers really... connect with this because and i think this is so tough to do it's almost like writing a great play or a great character in a play you want that character to feel vivid
But also you want there to be space for an actor to bring their own self and their own humanity in it. It's a really tough trick of writing. And I think she does that. Claire Keegan does that here in this book. the reader is able to bring so much to imagine this character this world and their way to connect with it themselves yet we're being told this very specific story
Before we wrap up, I just wanted to share some observations from readers because, as always, we invited readers to read along with us for this book club and share their thoughts with us. There's an article page up on the New York Times' website, Headline Book Club, Read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.
with the book review there are a lot of thoughtful conversations happening in the comments there so I just want to highlight a few and I know everyone here also has a few that they want to mention I just wanted to start off with Janice from Germany who wrote I have read this book many times as it works as...
a go to my own conscious. What small things do I woefully ignore every day just to get on with life? It's a beautiful and poignantly written examination of conscious for all of us. So I just love that comment. I'm going to just shout that out.
And then one more that I wanted to mention is Edward from New York, who writes, The efficiency of Keegan's gorgeous prose in this book is riveting. So few words, each simply the perfect one. Sublime writing. I... I really appreciated this comment from Patty from Colorado, who must have been an English professor in this or a past life. She writes, I'm struck by the sense of place and season and how the narrator's inner state is mirrored by the stillness of the trees and the holy hush of winter.
Juxtaposed with his frozen indecision is the passage about the river which knows where it must go. As he guides the girl through town, he is forced to speak to neighbors and their reaction to the girl's dirty feet in the snow. reflect the many shades of humanity's reaction to injustice. Just I never, I mean, obviously the landscape is so important to this book, but I wasn't even making those connections, but just shows you how this book works on so many levels. Truly. Yeah.
I have one short one and one longer one. The first is from Regina, a reader from Pennsylvania. And I'll just read the last line of her comment, which was, would that we could all possess the quiet courage of Bill Furlong. And I. totally agree with that i also forgot to mention there is a furlong in the dead too in the james choice story in case you're wondering and the second one i wanted to read is a little bit longer and it's from
Somebody named Dottie, who lives in California. I got lucky in that my senior community library had this book. I have been waiting for the movie and stumbled on the book. I read it quickly in one night under my blankets. truly so well written. It felt as if I was in Bill's shirt pocket for every moment. I could feel the cold, feel the soap and water when Bill washed his hands, feel what Bill was thinking all the while.
knowing how hard and unfair life can be. These are great comments. And again, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone for reading along with us. These are just a few. Go check out that article page. Join the conversation.
On that note, we have a really fun second segment to talk about some other book recommendations around the season. For this recommendation segment, I wanted to ask, what are some book recommendations of your favorite holiday literature i'm keeping that very vague and open for a reason this could be a book specifically about the holidays or this can be a book about something very different but there is a memorable holiday scene
But holiday can be also anything. It can be Christmas. It can be Hanukkah. It can be Thanksgiving. It can be New Year. I just want to thank holiday literature. What are your favorites? Take it away. Okay. This came to me almost in a dream. We'll talk about Loved and Missed by Susie Boyd anytime I can. Okay, thank you. The best. And that's such a good comparison. I can't believe I didn't think of that. Do you guys remember the Christmas scene? Okay.
I don't know this book. You need to bring yourself up to speed. It's probably the best book I read in 2021. I had this moment. I think I read this in 2022, like around the time that New York Review Books brought it out. And I was like. And I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience because I was like, I'm sorry.
Does nobody else know that this is a good book? And so I felt like I was about to start my own religion, right? And it's of Susie Boyd. So it follows this woman named Ruth who is raising her granddaughter.
Because her, Ruth's daughter, Eleanor, is struggling with addiction. That's basically the whole plot. But it's incredible for the emotional insight. And then... in a way that like I feel as moved and feel the compassion for the characters in a similar way that you do in Claire Keegan's writing.
Also, there is an absolutely devastating Christmas scene where Ruth goes to meet her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend. I don't even know if it's the baby's father. I can't remember. It's left unanswered. But Ruth... goes and she spreads out a blanket and she has all the dishes and they're sitting outside and they're freezing and it's because they have a very tenuous relationship Ruth and Eleanor. Eleanor doesn't really want to be clean at that point.
So this is the best they can do for a Christmas dinner together is sitting outside, freezing on a bench with the food that Ruth has cooked and brought to a park in London. And then they just disappear afterward. It is gutting. Listeners, I wish you could be in the studio because Juman is so passionately talking about this and Lauren and Liz are just furiously nodding along.
I'm going to go read this book. I'm actually so eager to say something that I almost took a big bite out of my microphone. Christmas dinner. Definitely not clean. But I didn't even, I love that comparison because Eleanor's addiction. please the same role in loved and missed as the convent. No, because it's the main thing.
But it's not actually, I don't know that it's ever even named or it's so subtle. It's happening offstage, but it's the main event. And that's what's happening in this town that Bill Furlong lives in. This horrific thing is happening. I imagine it at the top of a hill. I don't even know if it is at the top of a hill. And it's going on offstage, but it's actually...
determining everything that happens in the story. I think, you know, Bill and Ruth are both very no-nonsense in how they handle the situations that they're confronting. And Ruth, I think, is an amazing... sort of steward not only of her granddaughter, but even Eleanor's addiction. She's very compassionate and understanding and firm when it's a marvel. But I think they're also both motivated by the same feeling, which Phil thinks to himself.
towards the end of small things like these, which is what's the point of being alive if we don't help each other? What else do you got? Other recommendations? worried that mine is a little bit obvious but I can't help myself and it is The Dead the last story in Dubliners by James Joyce in case you haven't heard of it and it takes place at a
holiday party hosted by the two aunts of the main character whose name is Gabriel. And I actually looked in the book just to make sure that there really was a holiday scene and a meal, which it is actually the whole book. Like small things like these, it's festive, but there's this undercurrent of bittersweetness and tragedy, which makes it great. I'm going to see the...
annual performance of the dead that the Irish rep has here in the city where you basically are part of the play. I love this. Yeah, I'm going with my mom. I'm really excited. We have the best time. All right. What about you, Lauren? Okay. So I did my homework a little wrong. So sorry in advance. I have some recommendations. I have two.
Christmas happens in one of them, but I would not call it a Christmas novel. Again, this was very open and very flexible. So we're going to start with, I think this book reminded me so much, and actually for the reason you're talking about, Liz, of the main... like crime, the drama happening offstage. It made me think so much of women talking, but that book.
is centered around the conversations that these women are having in a Mennonite town where they are discovering, they are awakening to the realization that they have been repeatedly night after night. drugged and raped by the men in their town. So their husbands, brothers, fathers, like they're family members, they're members of their town. And that's all happened offstage. The entire book is the women.
Deciding collectively, arguing, whatever, deciding what to do. Do they stay and fight? Do they leave? What happens if they leave? Which children will they bring? How old are the oldest boys they will accept? devastating. And it reminded me very much of this book for those obvious reasons. And then the second one is a book that is older. I just read it for the first time. It's Ann Patchett's first novel called The Patron Saint of Liars, which takes place.
in a home for unwed, young, pregnant women in a home set up for them by these Catholic nuns in Kentucky. So the whole book is... The main character is this young woman who has come from California all the way to Kentucky. She's driven all the way and she has her baby there. And these women are pretty much forced to give up their children, but... This woman may or may not decide to do that. I really recommend that that novel too. And Christmas happens. It sounds very merry.
So I guess I have two recommendations. One I just thought of based off of that recommendation. And maybe I shouldn't be recommending because I haven't read it because it comes out next year. But I just want to flag that Grady Hendrix's new novel. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is about a similar setup. Who knows how it is? I haven't read it yet, but I just wanted to flag. If you want a horror novel approach to this type of story, that is coming out in 2025.
Book, though, that I really wanted to recommend. I guess it's not a book, it's a short story. It is The Frog King by Garth Greenwell. It is a short story that's in his collection, Cleanness. And I have been yelling about this story for years. It first ran in The New Yorker in 2018, and it is so good. It's set over Christmas and New Year, and it's about a couple. The couple is, and our protagonist is an American teacher teaching in Bulgaria.
And over the school break, he and his partner are going on a trip to Italy. And that's truly about it. It's a short story about happiness and love and... We often think like we need high drama and tension in a short story or in literature. But this one is the stakes and the tension is just like, how do you... cling on to love how do you appreciate it how do you show it how do you express it how do you let it wash over you and it is just
So beautiful and moving. And I have a quote because the writer Colm Tobin reviewed the collection in 2020 for their book review. And in his review, he specifically caught out the Frog King saying, quote,
The best of these stories, The Frog King, rivals John Updike's The Happiest I've Been, set in the same Christmas season as a great American story about happiness. And it's a story about happiness, but it's Garth Greenwell. It's... beautiful poetic sentences there's an erotic charge to this story as well there are like really haunting special moments in it it's
a Christmas story. It's a story about love. It's a story that makes me feel very emotional. It's one of my all-time favorite short stories and that's what I would recommend to you. That quote also made me think that there's definitely uptake in Claire Keegan. I don't know. There's points of similarity. Anyway. The frog reminded me. Have any of you guys read Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Laurie Moore?
Get on it. It's so good. I read it 30 years ago. I don't even remember what it's about. I think it's about old friends, little girls growing up together. I'm a little sketchy on the details, but it's truly one of my favorites. Add it to the list. Our reading list grows. I'm just riffing off the frog theme.
Well, I think that's all the time we have for today. Lauren, Liz, Jumana, thank you. This was so much fun. Thank you. This was really fun. And thank you to everybody who read along with us. Again, there is an article headlined, Book Club, Read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan with the book review. you continue the conversation there also while i'm saying thank you i just want to say this is our first full year of doing the book club and i just want to say a thank you to
Truly everybody. Thank you to Gilbert for letting us commandeer the podcast once a month for these. And I want to say a huge thank you to Maddie and Pedro, our producers who listen to us ramble every single month. Thank you for every person who's been on the show. Thank you, MJ. Thank you for doing it. Thank you. Thank you. I want to say thank you to. Any person who's written in and left a comment and read along with us and thank you to anyone.
listening i'm excited to continue this in 2025 and speaking of i teased at the beginning of the episode we're going to reveal our january 2025 book and that book is our evenings by alan hollinghurst We'll be chatting about the book on the podcast on January 31st.
We hope you're reading along with us. And if you do, there's an article up on the New York Times website, Headline Book Club. Read Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst with the book review. Very descriptive. Leave a comment there. Chat with us and with other readers. I'm excited to talk to you about that book next year. And until next time.
Happy reading and happy new year. That was MJ Franklin, Jumana Khatib, Elizabeth Egan, and Lauren Christensen talking about Clara Keegan's Small Things Like These. I've had a wonderful year in reading. I hope you have as well. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thank you very much for continuing to listen to us here at the Book Review Podcast.