Books

Written with a masterful touch

Irish author Colm Toibin joins elite company with his eloquent - and at times surprising - collection of short stories about the maternal bond.

By JOHN FREEMAN, Special to the Times
Published January 28, 2007

Ireland has been generous to the world in creating literary talents, especially short story writers. During the 20th century, James Joyce, John McGahern, William Trevor and Edna O'Brien made the short story form their own.

With Mothers and Sons, Colm Toibin catapults into this illustrious group - a remarkable feat, since it's his first outing in the form. These nine tales read like miniature novels; they are so assuredly paced and plangent in tone it is no exaggeration to compare them to Joyce's classic The Dubliners.

Like Joyce, Toibin begins in Dublin, but he stretches down the southeast coast and beyond. Read as a whole, the book shapes an enduring portrait of Ireland in the midst of a disorienting axial tilt - the country's sudden economic prosperity jostling old traditions, importing new expectations and rupturing familial loyalties.

Ireland may be the European Union's gleaming success story, but many of the characters in Mothers and Sons await the benefits of this surge. In A Song, a young man slips into a pub full of the "sort of people who would blissfully spill pints over your uilleann pipes" with nary an apology. He hears his estranged mother sing a song, then ducks out while the out-of-towners party on.

Cleverly, subtly, Toibin explores the tensions of this expanding world through the relationship between mothers and sons. The centripetal force of prosperity peels and tears at them. In The Use of Reason, a professional thief nearly gets caught in an art heist because his mother has been drinking and talking as if it were the old days, when strangers could be trusted.

A similar sense of betrayal hangs over A Long Winter, a novella-length tale about a young man whose mother hides her drinking problem. When he and his father try to force her to stop, she runs off into a snow storm. Shame delays their call for a search party, a move that probably costs her life.

Toibin never overplays these moments, eschewing melodrama even when the story seems to beg for it. In A Priest in the Family, a widowed mother is the last to learn that her son has committed horrible sexual abuses. Humiliated, yet unbowed, she decides to stand by him. The scene in which she informs him of this is as heartbreaking and perfectly cast as anything Toibin has written.

Toibin's previous novel, The Master, evoked Henry James in the waning decades of his life. Toibin didn't just climb inside his hero; he seemed to inhabit his prose, too, unfurling sentences as rich and seamless in their weave as those of the master himself.

In Mothers and Sons, Toibin reclaims his own rhythms. Once again his sentences are spare and almost Spartan. They make clarity look easy. Each paragraph follows the next, as fine and polished as a new sheet of glass. Reading this kind of prose flatters and enlightens our gaze. It makes these profound insights and age-old heartbreaks seem true and terrible, just like our own.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

The book

Mothers and Sons: Stories

By Colm Toibin

Scribner, 271 pages, $24

[Last modified January 25, 2007, 13:03:35]