Reading

The other night I stayed up late reading this story from the current New Yorker. (If you are reading this post sometime in the future after the link has expired, the story is called "Foster," and it's by Claire Keegan.) It was a week night, and my plan had been to go to bed early, but I thought, well, I'll just take the New Yorker to bed with me and have a look at the fiction. I read the story once, and it was a long story, and then I had to read it again almost all the way through to try to put things together that I didn't understand. So it was late when I turned out the light, after midnight, and I kept thinking about the story as I fell asleep and then it was the first thing I thought of in the morning, and I went to work thinking about it and wanting to write about it.

The story takes place in Ireland, I can't tell when exactly, but I would say some time in the last half of the last century, the 20th, that is. The setting is rural, and not very modern, but there are cars and TV and margarine. The narrator is a young girl who is sent, for the summer, to live with distant relatives of her mother's because there are too many mouths to feed at home. We get, very effectively, the limited perspective of the young girl, the things she doesn't understand about the people she is with, her fearfulness and then her growing comfort with them, because they are good people. The story is haunting, ambiguous, troubling, with lots of texture. I loved the way the Irish speech patterns are rendered: "And what way are you, Dan?" "What happened at all?"

One of the themes of the story is secrets, and at the end, when the girls has to go back to her less-than-happy home, she has promised herself not to tell her parents about what happened to her over the summer. But there is some ambiguity about what it is she must not tell. When I got to the end, I thought, okay, I need an English teacher to explain this to me. Then I remembered, wait, I am an English teacher. Then I had the impulse to reach for the instructor's manual, but of course there was no such thing.

So, instead, I invite you, my readers, to follow the link and read the story, and if you feel like, share your thoughts on it in the comments. I did come up with an interpretation of sorts, but I'm curious to see what others think before I post it.

Oh, and I have to share also that the piece of the story I will quote below, describing the daily work of housekeeping on a farm (in whatever period this is), made me abashed about my complaints about housekeeping chores.


From "Foster," by Claire Keegan:

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end, but each day follows on much like the one before. We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with porridge and toast for breakfast. Kinsella puts on his cap and goes out to the yard to milk the cows, and myself and the woman make a list out loud of the jobs that need to be done: we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards, take all the bedclothes out of the hot-press, hoover out the spiderwebs, and put all the clothes back in again, make scones, scrub the bathtub, sweep the staircase, polish the furniture, boil onions for onion sauce and put it in containers in the freezer, weed the flower beds, and, when the sun goes down, water things. Then it’s a matter of supper and the walk across the fields to the well. Every evening, the television is turned on for the nine-o’clock news and then, after the forecast, I am told that it is time for bed.