Colm Toibin’s first book of stories begins with a man on an upper balcony, looking out on a city that is a “great emptiness.” The image is a haunting one, if only because Toibin’s last, much acclaimed novel, “The Master,” was preoccupied with a man watching the world from an upstairs window, a secret sharer, relishing the power of being an observer while terrified, deep down, of being observed himself. That man was Henry James. In “The Use of Reason,” the opening story in Toibin’s beautiful and echoing collection, the man in question is a high-end thief in contemporary Ireland who, when not doing violence to others with calm ferocity, is picking off a Gainsborough and Rembrandt’s “Portrait of an Old Woman,” only to bury his treasure in the hills.
The thief is, of course, a master of his craft. He has a shrewd gift for assessing people and a solitary, meditative nature; he doesn’t mind being in jail because he likes being alone with his routine, his secrets, his talent for giving nothing away and for remaking everything within. He is also a supple reader of the world; emerging from incarceration, he had the feeling “that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that a person was merely a disguise for another person, that something said was merely a code for something else.”
He would find nothing to contradict that impression in the half-lit, stealthy, lamenting stories that follow. Toibin establishes his command over his materials early on, and the clenched, sepulchral tone never lets up. As “The Use of Reason” moves toward its conclusion, we meet the criminal’s mother and suddenly see another reason why he might feel guilty and alone. More than that, we see from whom he may have inherited his gifts for secrecy and treachery. The atmosphere of furtiveness and unease that the thief has set seeps like a stain across the world.
You pick up a book called “Mothers and Sons” and expect something reassuring and warm, domestic; but it is part of Toibin’s pitiless and often brilliant vision to show that mothers and sons are suspicious even of one another, less pietàs than emblems of missed connections. All nine stories include a mother and son in some figuration, but seldom are they seen together; their encounters are usually glancing, and have to do with embarrassment, and things not said. In some fundamental way, these are stories of people who are not there. “It was hard anyway since Jordi was absent from the other bed; it was the no sound coming from there kept him awake, the no snoring or rhythm of breathing, the no turning over which seemed to disturb him more than the wind, which appeared to have changed direction, blowing fiercely from the north in the few hours before the dawn, rattling the window.”
One story — “A Summer Job” — consists of almost nothing but a mother watching her son and trying to unlock the secret of his self-containment: is it a sign of strength, or only of the crippling weakness he fears and tries to keep at bay? Is he too full of feeling or, more terrifyingly, too empty of it? What is he pushing down with his sullen efficiency? Another, equally transfixing, and no more than a vignette, really, gives us a woman driving her depressed son back from a hospital to their home where his father — her husband — is half-paralyzed by a stroke. Throughout the long drive in the dark — many of these stories have the spooked air of a lonely Springsteen song — the boy refuses to sit in the front seat beside his mother. This is not, in other words, a collection to share with your loved ones on the second Sunday in May.
It is, however, a book to be offered to anyone who savors some of the most accomplished and nuanced soundings contemporary fiction has to offer; the opening portrait of the robber and his mother sets the tone for what is really a stunning series of variations on a theme. Toibin is obsessed with people in hiding, often from themselves, and from their acts and feelings, and what his book conveys is how much all of us are fugitives, terrified of being found out, even in the day-to-day context of an ordinary life. A dutiful woman loses her husband in a car crash and has to hide from her children and neighbors how desperate her finances have become; a widow, almost 80, hears that her son has been accused of terrible crimes, and goes on playing bridge and entertaining her grandsons as if to keep the truth remote. Pride keeps faces and lives intact in this writer’s world, but just underneath the surface everything is collapsing.
Toibin’s real interest is in the constant, silent dialogue of watcher and watched; the light is fading in most of these stories, and someone is looking out a window, to see if he’s being seen. “Watchful” is the word for both the author and his people, who are always keenly observant and yet on guard, as if about to be exposed at any moment. There are headlines hovering around the pieces — Thief Makes Off With £5 Million Rembrandt, Priest Is Charged With Abuse of Boys, Woman Who Walked Out on Husband and Son Is Presumed Dead Under Snowfall. Yet none of these dramas are shown; Toibin’s interest is in consciousness, how drama plays out inside the mind of an observer. Each narrative spins out like the compulsive story of someone inside a confessional, with no one to talk to but himself.
Really, then, these are less stories than studies of inwardness, a series of interiors. (As one character walks around a house, “he was acutely alert to the shadowy places, becoming darker in the twilight, the places where you could hide and then appear.”) One begins with a woman hiding out, in effect, inside the “dark and concentrated” space of her darkroom, and we later read that she “kept a large camera close to her in case she would need to cover her face.” But all the protagonists here seem most comfortable in small shut-in spaces and betray no eagerness for bright lights or company, or for the world outside (except as it’s seen through a window). It’s easy to imagine Toibin himself as a photographer, steadily, patiently developing his portraits of characters and their predicaments. Were dead bodies and funerals not such a recurrent figure in the work, the collection could be called “Nine Lives.”
Yet the title he has chosen is a perfect one, not least because — refreshingly — he is clearly as much at home with his mothers as his sons; story after story centers on a woman, old, middle-aged or young, whom the male author inhabits as fully as himself. The way he lets his characters disclose themselves is always calm and level. Yet just beneath the clear and measured prose, there is always a tremor of something more bestial and crude: two Catholic Brothers are suddenly seen pleasuring themselves in a back room; a capable young widow starts to trace obscene words on her skirt while being lectured to by a bank manager; a recently bereaved young man suddenly gives in to his covert desire for another man. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that what these characters seem to crave is privacy, the chance not to be known.
This longing to be anonymous is at odds, however, with a very close-knit Irish world where everyone is watching everyone else, and everything is everybody’s business. The stories here are set in modern Ireland, although the final one in fact takes place in a Spanish village so cold and dark and full of whispers that it might as well be Toibin’s Ireland: “There were still 10 or 12 houses inhabited in the village; nothing happened that was not noticed, the old people sat by windows watching.” Toibin is not a typical Irish writer if you associate such with musical rhapsodies, loquaciousness or blarney; but he has a deep and elegiac sense of his homeland that comes out in his cadences and dialogue.
The backdrop of these pieces is, in fact, a knelling sense of an old world coming to an end, the light beginning to darken. It is not just family that is a dying species here, but community. How thoroughly he has taken in his setting is evident just in the listing, for example, of the regular customers that a supermarket owner has to visit while hand-delivering groceries: “Paddy Duggan, who lived on his own in a tithe cottage which had not been cleaned since his mother died; Annie Parle and her soft sister from near the Bloody Bridge with five gates to open and close before you reached their old farmhouse; the twins Patsy and Mogue Byrne, who ate potatoes and butter for their dinner every day with boiled rice and stewed prunes for their sweet. Neither of them ... ever took off his cap.”
If you free yourself from the spell of the sentences, you may ask whether it is really so easy to filch an old master, or whether having a child, as one mother finds, “did not really make the great change in their lives that she expected.” You may wonder if a mother could ever keep her early recording career from her growing son, or how many thieves outside the movies really are so ruminative and quietly withdrawn. The unrelenting darkness and suppression in this book may be too much for some — even a road here is a “hidden, almost guilty thing” and a dawn “looked more like fading light than the break of day.” When one character flies to California, what she finds is “an enclosed city of the dead, the houses like small tombs.”
Yet the very continuity of tone and theme — even of lighting — that Toibin sustains across many worlds is part of what makes this book less a collection of pieces than an organic whole. We meet a woman with a drinking problem and then, when we meet another with the same problem, eight stories later, each makes the other richer. The sudden explosion of gay desire that comes out in one piece haunts the simmering of the same impulse two stories later. When Toibin introduces us to a “great emptiness” in the first, six-word sentence of the book, the word “emptiness” tolls with mounting force as it recurs throughout the story. And then we feel something like epiphany when it comes back with new resonance in the second half of the final piece.
The short story is a craftsman’s form, and Toibin’s craft is immaculate. Not many writers in Britain and Ireland are working at this level of intensity and seriousness, with not a slack sentence in 270 pages and nothing shoddy or easily sardonic throughout. The short story also seems an ideal form for a writer much more interested in emotion, and the slow exposing of a character, than in action or community. “The Master” presented us with one exquisite scene after another, taking us deep into the tremblings of a man so anxious to be in control of everything that he flinched from life itself. But as it progressed, this reader at least felt that its maker did not know how to conclude it — or did not want to come to any resolution — and the sense of things not known began to seem a liability.
At the same time as “The Master” came out, moreover, Alan Hollinghurst brought out his elegantly unbuttoned “Line of Beauty,” which appeared to go Toibin one better by at once evoking the ghost of Henry James and pitching it into a fully fleshed modern London that seemed to mock all the delicacy and understatement James stood for. In “Mothers and Sons,” however, Toibin shows how he can get the figure at the window, and the modern city down below, the fastidious novelist and the heroin dealer, into the same frame. Most books so full of artful sentences run the danger of being stage-managed perfections. Toibin, however, never stints on feeling. Behind his impeccable sentences — and silences — something is always raging to get out.
By Jerome Groopman, M.D.
