Cathal, the main character and perspective in the story is a man you might have met but wouldn’t want to know. The combination of his symptomatically revelatory actions and unwillingness to reflect or follow difficult thoughts makes for the most brilliantly uncomfortable reading. Developing over a single afternoon and evening, the story switches between a recent past when Cathal starts a relationship with an Anglo-French woman, Simone, and a lonely present. Something has gone drastically wrong but there’s a tension in its progression that feels disproportionate to the content.
As he tries to work out and avoid what happened, we accumulate “evidence”: his criticism of the “lazy” women he sees in Vermeer paintings, the recurring anger about the six Euros he spent on cherries, his irritation at the space her stuff takes up when she moves in. There are funny if jaw-dropping details and spare, normalised moments of horror but, as always with Keegan, the individual always leads to the systemic and institutional.
First published in French as a stand-alone story, ‘Misogynie’ and translated from the English by Jacqueline Odin. Published in English in The New Yorker, February 2022, and then as a stand-alone story by Faber, 2023. Listen to Keegan reading the story here.
A Personal Anthology 