Foster by Claire Keegan

Published by Grove Press on November 1, 2022

The mother in a large family is about to have another baby. The parents can barely feed the children they already have. They ask a childless couple to take one of their daughters until her mother gives birth. Only after the girl has lived with the Kinsellas for part of the summer does a neighboring gossip reveal why the couple is childless.

The girl is initially ambivalent about staying with strangers. She doesn’t know how long she will stay with the Kinsellas or whether her parents will want her back. Her father doesn’t say goodbye to her when he drops her off. Like the other adult men she has observed, her father says little of consequence. He talks about the weather, exaggerates the size of his crop of hay when he talks to John Kinsella. “He is given to lying about things that would be nice, if they were true.”

Like the girl’s parents, the Kinsellas are farmers. Unlike her parents, they are making a go of it. John and Edna welcome the girl into their lives. Edna gives the girl a hot bath, cleans her nails, digs wax out of her ears, does all the things her mother is too busy to do. John helps her with her reading and corrects her when she substitutes “yeah” for “yes.” When the girl’s complexion begins to improve, Edna says “All you need is minding.” Every child needs minding if they are to stay safe and reach their full potential. Edna has become protective with no child of her own to mind, which might explain her failure to understand how the girl’s parents could leave her with strangers.

Edna would like to give the girl’s mother some money, but the girl knows that her proud father would object. Her father drinks. He lost their red heifer gambling. Her parents have given little thought to educating her. Her clothes are hand-me-downs. She isn’t the victim of abuse, but to some extent, she has been neglected.

Visiting the Kinsellas opens a new world for the girl, a world where reading is valued, where she can wear clothing that fits. John challenges her to run to the mailbox every day and is proud when she becomes faster. Having adults pay attention to her, to encourage her, makes the summer away from her family pass quickly. In the Kinsella home, she has “room and time to think.” She would rather stay than return home.

As Colm Tóibín has done in his fiction, Claire Keegan emphasizes the malicious gossip that characterizes life in rural Ireland (and for that matter, in much of small-town America). When a neighbor has a chance to talk to the girl alone, she pries into the details of the Kinsellas’ life and tells her the secret John and Edna have kept to themselves. The girl wonders at the neighbor’s smug, self-satisfied laughter when she reveals a family tragedy that is none of the girl’s business, nor the neighbor’s. The Kinsellas keep their grief to themselves, but they have not let it overwhelm their ability to live or to care about others.

Foster is a spare story. Much in the novella is left unsaid. The relationship of the Kinsellas to the girl’s parents is unclear. We learn little about the girl’s siblings. We don’t even know the girl’s name. She has no reason to tell us those things. She instead narrates her thoughts, fears, and discoveries. She describes unfamiliar events (John is asked to dig a grave for a neighbor; she sees her first dead body at the wake). She learns that people are different from each other. Edna differs from the gossipy neighbor because, as John explains it, Edna “wants to find the good in others, and her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is.”

From John, the girl learns that there are times when it is better to practice silence. “Many’s the man lost much just because he missed the perfect opportunity to say nothing.” The girl makes good use of that advice when she next sees her parents.

The novella’s ending, like life, leaves the reader wondering what will happen next. It doesn’t seem likely to be good, at least in the next few minutes that will follow the story’s end. On the other hand, the girl’s life has likely been changed, set on a path of undreamt possibilities, because strangers were kind to her. Perhaps she has a sense of what her life could be. John tells her that women are good with “eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before men even get a whiff of it.”

The eventualities are left for the reader to ponder. Everything that comes before the reader’s imagination takes over is told in a young, gentle voice. The girl senses the importance of events. She overlooks nothing but understands less than the adult reader. This is a coming of age story told by a girl who isn’t prepared to understand what might come next. The girl will need to think about what she has learned before it all makes sense to her. The joy of Foster is that the same is true for the reader.

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