Why the novel matters

Why the novel matters Why the novel matters newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/10/why-novel-matters-imperialism-absolute-karl-ove-knausgaard October 26, 2022 The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that music could lift him up. Of course there’s nothing remarkable about that – only he then added: and put me down somewhere else. I recognise that quote so well, especially when it comes to literature. The last time I experienced that sensation was last winter after reading Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These. It’s a short novel and I read it in the space of a couple of hours. When I finished it, I remained in my chair with the book lowered in my lap for a few minutes, completely filled by its emotions and moods. After a while I got to my feet and vanished into the daily round, the impressions the novel had made on me slowly dwindling until there was barely anything left other than a certain feeling that came over me when I turned my thoughts to it. Reading is nearness; we read to get near to something. What do we get near to in Small Things Like These? The novel, set in a small Irish town, follows the thoughts and perceptions of Bill Furlong. Furlong is a coal merchant, a married man with five daughters. He works hard, but the family is struggling. Sometimes he feels life is running through his hands. But the thing about Bill Furlong, which he perhaps isn’t aware of himself, is that he’s a good man. And in many ways Small Things Like These is a novel about goodness. In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, goodness as an idea takes on physical existence in the figure of Prince Myshkin, the absolute example of the good person, and gains its force in the collision between the ideal and the real. The Idiot is a novel of ideas, or, as Dostoevsky himself called it, fantastic realism. The goodness we encounter in Small Things Like These is of a quite different character. It is vague, fleeting, elusive – in Bill Furlong it manifests itself in a thought here, a small action there. If goodness is a light, then it’s not a powerful beam exposing a social reality, as in Dostoevsky, but a weak, flickering flame. No one in Keegan’s novel talks about the good in people, it’s just something that occurs, nameless and ordinary. And that – bringing to life what is there, teasing it forth, as if from underneath the conceptions that so firmly hold it in their grasp – is something only the novel can do.