Book Report: Foster

19. Claire Keegan, Foster (2010) (12/29/24)

Keegan has been variously recommended to me this year, in particular for this book and another, Small Things Like These, which has recently been made into a movie. She is also the author of a book of "stories of men and women," So Late in the Day, and—surprise! a book I already own (but, needless to say, haven't read yet), Antarctica. Her spare yet richly felt style has been widely praised: Hilary Mantel remarks in the back-of-the-jacket blurbs that "every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion," while the Irish Times comments that Foster "has beauty, harshness, menace, and the spine of steel worthy of high art."

At 92 loosely set pages, it's a quick read, though I found myself constantly slowing down to savor—a turn of phrase, a particular description, the subtlety with which Keegan suggests strong feeling. The story, told from the perspective of a young, nameless girl, is simple, beginning with her being dropped off by her father with some relatives, the Kinsellas, to spend the summer. But this is Ireland, sometime in the past, and there is an underlying current of disquiet: the girl's family has too many children to support well, the father is a drinker; the Kinsellas have suffered a tragic loss, which is clear to the reader from early on but comes as a world-changing revelation for the girl. Small-town tongues wag indiscriminately. It's a world both beautiful, as evoked through such homely chores as cow tending and rhubarb jam making, and hard. But in this temporary home the girl also discovers a different, more hopeful sort of love than she had ever experienced.

Here is a scene from early on, just after the girl has arrived:

     'Hands up,' she says, and takes my dress off.
     She tests the water and I step in, trusting her, but this water is too hot.
     'Get in,' she says.
     'It's too hot.'
     'You'll get used to it.'
     I put one foot through the steam and feel again the same, hot scald. I keep my foot in the water, and then, when I think I can't stand it any longer, my thinking changes, and I can. This water is deeper and hotter than any I have ever bathed in. Our mother bathes us in what little she can, and sometimes makes us share. After a while, I lie back and through the steam watch the woman as she scrubs my feet. The dirt under my nails she prises out with tweezers. She squeezes shampoo from a plastic bottle, lathers my hair and rinses the lather off. Then she makes me stand and soaps me all over with a cloth. Her hands are like my mother's hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

There are many other quiet moments of realization like this, other moments of strong feeling. The narrator has clear eyes, and we come to feel we're viewing the world through them too.

It's a lovely book.