It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be.” As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. Early on, she thinks: “Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.”īut this man, Kinsella, is affectionate with her, and she does not know how to accept the differences between the world she has known and this new one she fails to understand: “Kinsella takes my hand in his. Kinsella, distancing references, because the girl–observant as she is-lacks an emotional connection with the world around her.

The girl does not ask the dog’s name, and in her thoughts she refers to her uncle as Kinsella, her aunt as Mrs. For example, when the Kinsella’s hound greets her and her uncle at his car, “It’s only now I realise I’ve not heard either one of them call him by his name.”

I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.”Īs welcoming are her aunt and uncle are, clearly good people, they are not the source of the words she needs. But her father has forgotten her clothing, and she has to be dressed in boy’s garments that don’t quite fit.Īlmost immediately in this different setting, the child has an insight about her inability to know what to call people and even physical sensations: “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. No one has explained why she is there, how long she will be there, or what is expected of her in this new place, which she sees immediately is neater, cleaner, and more abundant than the home she came from. When the novella-set in County Wexford around 1980-begins, the girl is uprooted from the only home she has ever known, where she has existed among similarly unnamed siblings with another on its way, to have her father deposit her with her mother’s sister and her husband, the Kinsellas, a couple who will foster her. In her case, it’s not a choice of detachment but symptomatic of a lack of the ability to bond.

Not knowing what to call people and animals is an ongoing dilemma for Keegan’s also unnamed child narrator, a girl bewildered by the circumstances of her young life. Naming serves as a vital source of connection. While reading Claire Keegan’s impeccable novella, I couldn’t help thinking of the old saw about stray animals that wander into your yard: if you name it, you own it.

Claire keegan new book