Foster by Clare Keegan

Keegan received the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize when this first appeared in the New Yorker. Now published in an expanded form, this lyrical story, told through the eyes of a young girl, evokes the nuances and subtleties that develop between child and parent — and, in this case, foster parent.

Her helplessness, her unarticulated hopes and fears, her heightened sensibility to the smells and sights of her new home are subtly suggested. We know neither her name nor her age, yet the one summer spent away from home with strangers, isolated in a lonely farmhouse in Ireland, will live in the memory.

Her mother is pregnant, struggling with the demands of her big and poor family so her father takes her to stay, she doesn’t know for how long, with John and Edna Kinsella. With no belongings, the moment she walks into their kitchen, she is conscious of differences: “here it is hot and still and clean. Tall ox-eyed daisies are still as the tall glass of water they are standing in.” Gradually she becomes aware of the subliminal messages passing between husband and wife and realises “there is no sign, anywhere, of a child”. It is not long before she is firmly told “there are not secrets in this house”. Thereby hangs a tale that will slowly unravel as the girl becomes increasingly conscious of the affection, nurture and unspoken threat in the home of her temporary carers. “I’m really interested in how powerless children are and how much at the mercy of their parents and their minders they are,” says Keegan.

Her writing is ideally suited to the short story form, her aim being to search for “the exact language for a situation and to imagine that life, which is a slow process”. In Foster the apparently simple plot carries a deep, enduring wealth of meaning that frees the reader to plumb the depths of this haunting story.