This is the story of an interesting, poliglot woman of international upbringing and of many qualities and of how she took back her life, seen through the eyes of the mediocre man who didn't manage to crush her sense of self with his stinginess in matters of both money and feelings.
This is also the story of mysoginy being born, cradled, and cultivated through the obstinate refusal to take accountability.
It's a tale of such crude simplicity in its ugly truth, that when I realised what was REALLY going on in this guy's head - "the woman could cook" being the first hint at his entitled sense of what part she deserved in the relationship - I felt a jolt of physical disgust.
I always found amazing how physical nausea and moral anger go hand in hand. Take this very short story: the further I went - I'd say waded - into its protagonist's murky psyche, the more uneasy and a bit queasy I felt. When the first "cunt" hit the page, I had lost all interest in my dinner. Not because the guy had made mistakes, we all do; rather because, confronted openly (and apparently for the first time in his life) with the starch reality of how himself and many Irish men see and treat women, he didn't find in himself anything more to do than to whine about his upbringing, rage against a random animal, sulk against all the female characters as if they were ganging up against him, and in the end go to bed feeling sorry for himself. Mysoginy is lack of accountability.
Claire Keegan's mastery shines through most of the narrative, which made the flashback to the crass family practical joke seem a bit heavy-handed by contrast. Many other reviewers had the same feeling, and indeed, the coarseness is there.This said, her style didn't let us down. Read well the first page again; Dublin's miraculous sunny summer day is described in a series of positive images that end describing children, and immediately after that, there is a comment on the way everything ends. There it is, the story in a nutshell.
Children are referred to repeatedly throughout the narrative; in the light of the story's development, I interpreted this first mention as a prefiguration of the protagonist's obsession with all HE's lost, with all HE expected her secretly to do for him, with all HE feels when confronted with his own ugliness reflected in her eyes, laid out so "continentally" in clear words in front of him. Never once are we told how he feels about HER. His loss congeals around all these children HE won't have; we will never know HER opinion about having children, and if it weren't for our inferences allowed by Claire Keegan's impeccable story-telling, we would never know anything of her through him. Actually, he doesn't have a clue himself of what we know about the woman he lost. So good is Claire Keegan at writing, that we see a complex portrait of a woman through the words of a man who doesn't see any of what we see. And the sad truth of this short story is that he doesn't even care to see. He liked his dinners cooked but would rather not have to help washing up. That sums him up pretty tidily.
Claire Keegan managed twice, already, to describe through a male character the plight of women in a world that hates them. I find it a refreshing perspective and a fair one. In this sense, So Late In The Day is the contrapunt to Small Things Like These, where a man refuses to keep avoiding accountability for the way a young woman is treated by society. Claire Keegan is apparently building a literary anthropology of the Irish man in relation to mysoginy, and I am living for it.
I can't wait to read a VERY long novel where everything comes together.

One last edit: I don't agree with the official description of Cathal thinking about a "woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently." Wrong. Cathal could never have acted any differently, nor did he leaves the story with any learning.To the very end, he kept regretting the money spent, the investment not returned. ( )

A day in the life of Cathal, a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Until it is too late. An examination of misogyny, narrow-minded meanness in the context of one man's relationship with the woman he believed he loved. No spoilers here. The whole thing takes under half an hour to read. Read it. ( )

Barely even long enough to be called a novella, but there's a lot packed in here, leaving me with lots to think about. ( )

Looking Back at an Ending
Review of the Faber & Faber hardcover edition (August 31, 2023) of the short story/novella as it first appeared in The New Yorker (Online February 21, 2022)

Then a line from something he’d read somewhere came to him, to do with endings: about how, if things have not ended badly, they have not ended.

A man named Cathal seems to be going about a very ordinary day. He returns home from work while reminiscing about a relationship with a woman named Sabine. Very gradually we learn how they met, how events proceeded and how it all ended. Things turned quite bitter by the end and we finally understand the meaning behind what the day was supposed to have been.

See photograph at https://media.newyorker.com/photos/620e8f3cf99f2e995b6cb758/3:4/pass/220228_r399...
Story themed photograph by Edna Bowe for The New Yorker. Image sourced from The New Yorker, Online February 21, 2022. (Note: The link takes you to the story itself. If you have exhausted your free reads, you should still be able to access Claire Keegan's own reading of the book.)

Claire Keegan has produced yet another of her engrossing stories where the secrets behind the surface are only gradually revealed. This may not have quite the impact of her now classic Small Things Like These (2021), but is just as devastating in its own way.

Trivia and Link
Author Claire Keegan is interviewed about the background to her writing of So Late in the Day which you can read at Claire Keegan on Drama versus Tension by Deborah Treisman, Online February 21, 2022. ( )

I had intended to buy this collection of three short stories, when I came across one of the three in The New Yorker, February, and realized that I had in fact read the other two in the collection in Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields.

The short story whose name in the title of the book, can be listened to online in New Yorker, February 2022.

So Late in the Day is a near-perfectly written story about a few hours in the life on a man whose misogyny and lack of empathy is slowly revealed as he goes about his life on the day his marriage didn’t happen. Every feeling, thought and action is exquisitely drawn; the pace is almost unbearably slow, as the full extent of the man’s poverty of personality is revealed.

A Long and Painful Death is published in Walk the Blue Fields. A female writer has a residency in the seaside home of Heinrich Böll. Her peace is disrupted by an unwelcome male visitor.

In Antarctica published in Antarctica a married woman who spends the night with a stranger in order to see what it feels like ends up in a spoiler alert. The less said about this the better.

All three stories are about men and what’s wrong with them. Seriously, there’s no other way to say it. ( )