Colm Tóibín’s THE EMPTY FAMILY: 2011 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award Shortlist

The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín

It is not often that I like an author’s novels better than his or her short stories. Usually, the writing is better in short stories than in novels, not only because it is difficult to sustain careful, precise, evocative writing over the long haul, but also because of the short’s story’s dependence on thematic significance communicated by careful poetic patterning of language.

I liked Colm Tóibín’s The Master, as a stylistic tour de force and loved Brooklyn because its universal theme, communicated by such carefully written language, suggested the technique of a short story than that of a novel (See my earlier blog entry on Brooklyn, January 20, 2010). However, I did not like Tóibín’s first collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, and I am no big fan of his recent collection, Empty Family, in spite of its being short listed for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.

Of the six collections on that list, Tóibín’s book has received the most attention by reviewers, albeit, not so much by American reviewers, who, with the exception of positive reviews in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, pretty much ignored it. However, reviewers in Canada, Australia, England, and Ireland were mostly unanimous in their praise for the collection, which I thought lackluster, ordinary, and even sometimes carelessly written, as if Tóibín had so little respect for the short story form he used it only for “occasional” writing. In my opinion, he has not given it the care and careful attention that he did in The Master and Brooklyn.

In the opening story of The Empty Family, “The Silence,” Tóibín returns to his mentor of The Master, Henry James, taking an anecdote from James’s Notebooks to put together a fictional recreation of Lady Gregory’s account of her short-lived but heated affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. As a result of the affair, Gregory wrote a group of sonnets, which Blunt, at her request, published under his name. In my opinion, a competently done, but hardly Jamesian, literary jeu d' esprit, in which Tóibín attempts to write the story that James did not get around to writing.

The title story, “The Empty Family,” begins with a signature thematic sentence for this collection of stories, as well as a classic Irish theme ever since George Moore’s 1903 The Untilled Field: “I have come back here.” The story is a sort of meditation addressed to a former lover by a man who, while living in California, drives out to the ocean every Saturday so he can stand there and “miss home.” He returns to County Wexford where “home was some graves where my dead lay outside the town of Enniscorthy, just off the Dublin Road.” In a central passage that echoes Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” the narrator looks out over the sea and focuses on a single wave to discover that although the wave comes toward us as if to save us, it does nothing, withdrawing in a “shrugging irony, as if to suggest this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing but a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy.” A bit too facile and self-indulgently ruminative, it seems to me.

“One Minus One,” also addressed to a former lover, is mainly a meditation about a man’s return to Ireland to attend the dying of his mother. For everyone who has made this melancholy journey back home for the deathwatch and funeral service of a mother or father, this will seem a familiar experience, which Tóibín handles in a quite ordinary personal essayistic way.

“Two Women” is about Frances, a movie set designer, living in California, who returns to Dublin to work on a film. She recalls her broken relationship years before with her dead lover, an Irish actor. The woman is a brittle, crusty old lady, scornful of her home country and just about everyone with whom she comes in contact, although we are not sure if this attitude has anything to do with that old lover affair. When she meets the widow of her ex-lover in a most convenient, unlikely encounter, they have a sit-down, heart-to-heart that seems inconsequential. Although the woman is “careful to use detail sparingly but make it stand for a lot,” I am not so sure that Tóibín does the same in this story.

“The New Spain” is about Carme Giralt, who, exiled as a communist under Franco, returns to Barcelona to claim an inheritance from her grandmother—an inheritance that has excluded her parents. In its focus on family conflicts, the story is much like the loose pieces in Tóibín’s earlier collection, Mothers and Sons.

“The Colour of Shadows” is about a Dublin businessman who goes to Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s homeplace) to care for his aunt, suffering from dementia. She becomes paranoid that he has been seeing his mother, who has been cut off from the family for deserting the narrator (who is gay) when he was a boy--something his family cannot accept.

“The Pearl Fishers” is about a man who writes thrillers having dinner with a married couple of friends. The wife, who is writing a book about being sexually abused as a young woman by a priest, does not know that her husband and the narrator were lovers in high school. He is on the verge of telling her about his past love with her husband, but is prevented by the disclosure of her own secret. In her New York Times Review, Francine Prose names “Pearl Fishers” the best story in the collection, suggesting that, “multiple ironies, some obvious and others quite subtle, are allowed to shimmer lightly in the atmosphere surrounding the former friends. Resonating throughout the story, the contrasts between action and intention, expectation and outcome alter our perception of the characters: of who they were as teenagers and how they became the adults on whom we are eavesdropping.” As much as I respect Prose’s book Reading Like A Writer, I cannot agree that this story has that much Jamesian stylistic subtlety.

“Pearl Fishers” introduces the reader to something previously missing from Tóibín’s fiction, explicit descriptions of male sexual encounters. The narrator recalls sex with the husband, remembering “I had fed his sweet, thick, pungent, lemony sperm into my mouth with my fingers as if it were jam, desperately trying to make sure that none was wasted.” The sexual descriptions, describing painful anal intercourse, continue in “Barcelona, 1975,” which is about a young Irish man who leaves Dublin at age 20 for Barcelona (as did Tóibín) and takes a lover The emphasis in these sexual scenes is merely on the physical event, not the significance of the event. The prose is routine and ordinary, for example: “I don’t know when I first let my new friend fuck me. I had been fucked for a few seconds the year before, but it was so painful I had made the guy take his dick out forthwith and keep it out. Another guy, summer before I left Ireland, had tried more successfully, but it was better when I fucked him. So when my new friend asked me if I liked fucking or being fucked, I said I like fucking. He said he did too, and in fact he hated being fucked and couldn’t do it.” That, it seems to me, is just tedious, purposeless, writing, regardless of what act it describes.

When asked by one interviewer if he was trying to shock readers with the sex scenes, Tóibín replies, ”with a gale of giggles,” “Yes, that’s thrown in for mischief.” But then more defensively, he adds, “It’s actually an important part of me, and it’s an important part of the world and here it is, and I’m not ashamed of it and I’m certainly not going to hide it, and it’s going in my next book and if you can’t deal with that I can’t…I’m certainly not going to do anything about it such as not put stories into the book or not write things that occur to me. You just have to go wherever things take you. I’m not sure you can take everyone with you, but you should be prepared to try.”

Although one can certainly agree that Tóibín has the right to describe that which is important to him, that which, to some extent defines him as a person, at the same time, a reader has a right to question whether these flatly described explicit sex scenes are anything more meaningful than examples of the author’s right to disclose. Hermione Lee of the Guardian says, “Every so often he allows himself some lavish, graphic sexual writing, as though challenging us to read these descriptions any differently from his scenes of longing for lost family homes or missed landscapes.”

The reviewer in The Toronto Star, Alex Good, suggests the sex passages give one the feeling that “Tóibín is determined to overcompensate for James’s reticence” about male sex. Good argues, “It’s not being prudish to feel that descriptions of analingus or remarks on the taste and consistency of spunk are out of place in stories that otherwise eschew physicality for the inner life. Tóibín’s characters get defined by their sexual urges and behavior, which is a trap that James took some pains to avoid.”

Reviewers are more accepting of the sex scenes in the longest story in the collection, “The Street,” about a young Muslim immigrant, Malik, who has come to Barcelona and must work out the cost of his passage by selling phone cards. Reviewers call it a “daring story,” a “dangerous, dramatic story.” Because it deals with issues of immigration, marginalization Muslim strictures about moral behavior, and because Malik is a young man struggling with his sexuality, reviewers seem ready to ignore the sexuality in favor of the multicultural social issues. However, I think an Australian reviewer best understands the success of this story, suggesting that “The Street” is one of the best stories because “ultimately Tobin is a novelist rather than a short-story writer; his preference for stories of sweeping emotion sits better in extended narratives that allow for character growth and development rather than the sculpted precision shorter narratives demand.”

For me the central issue of Tóibín’s stories is whether they are tightly written, precisely structured short stories, or merely occasional authorial pastimes and recollections to while away the time in between what her perhaps thinks is the more important work of writing novels. Tóibín’s short fiction certainly embodies some of the obsessions of the Irish short story—the theme of exile and return, the notion of the lonely voice--but I am not sure that Tóibín takes the form as seriously as he does his novels.

Heather Ingman, who has written a book on the Irish short story, says in The Irish Times, “For the reader prepared to read slowly and savour the silences between the words, there are rich rewards in this collection.” In my opinion, although Tóibín's novels encourage us to read slowly, his short stories do not.

Francine Prose opens her review in The New York Times by asking: Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia, and regret?… In its search for the surprising yet inevitable chain of events that will illuminate a character’s---and the reader’s—life, a short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.” I agree. I just do not get a glimpse of the genie in the stories of Colm Tóibín.

I will discuss the fifth book in the 2011 Frank O’Connor Award shortlist, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, by Yiyun Li (who won the inaugral Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2005 for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) in a few days.

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn: A Novel To Be Read Like a Short Story

Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn was awarded the Costa Novel of the Year award a couple of weeks ago. Through no fault of Toibin, the novel will always evoke a sadness in me. It is the last novel that I listened to while walking my dog Shannon each morning in the neighborhood. As I have mentioned before, the only time I “read” novels is when I “listen” to them on my Ipod. Since I don’t think novels require the kind of close reading that fine short stories do, I usually get bored with them on the page, but enjoy listening to someone read them as Shannon and I stroll for a half hour each morning.

I am sad to say that Shannon died Saturday night, January 16, about 15 minutes before midnight—fifteen years to the day after we brought her home from the animal shelter and made her part of our family. My wife and I had been nursing her for the past couple of weeks while she grew weaker and weaker from kidney failure and a weak heart. She could not walk any more, and she refused to eat, except when I got some homemade chicken broth down her with a turkey baster. All we could do was make her comfortable, keep her hydrated, and watch over her. We were sitting with her when she died.

Different people have different attitudes toward their pets. I grew up on a farm where dogs were only as good as they were useful—for hunting, herding, and guarding the house. They were fed scraps, were not allowed indoors, and were not particularly mourned when they died. My wife, whose heart is so tender she would not step on a bug, has taught me different ways. Shannon, our second dog in our thirty years of marriage (Ollie, our first also died at age 15.) was indeed a member of the family and treated as such. I will miss my morning walks with her. I will continue walking, for the sake of my heart, and listening to novels, for the sake of my education, but it is just not the same on the treadmill or walking alone.

I have been thinking about my experience listening to Brooklyn. It is a relatively short novel, at 250 pages, but, as usual with novels, I got very impatient with it, damning it for the endless details and verisimilitude that I could have done without. It is a simple and formulaic story of Irish immigration—Ireland’s favorite story since the Potato Famine. The central character is Eilis, a young woman who lives in Enniscorthy, a fair sized town in county Wexford, south of Dublin. It is the 1950’s and Eilis lives with her mother and older sister. She has a poor-paying job in a store, but has goals of becoming an accountant. However, she cannot find a decent job and the young men of the town are not very interested in her. A priest who now lives in New York, but is visiting his hometown in Ireland, helps her immigrate to America and finds her a job and a place to live.

With the financial help of her sister, this is accomplished with a lot of detail about her preparations, her journey, her job, her housemates, her landlady. She meets a young man, Tony, of Italian descent, begins dating him, attends night school to study accounting, and generally begins to settle in. Then she gets word of her sister’s sudden death, but before she leaves for Ireland, Tony convinces her to secretly marry him in a civil ceremony. As with most things in Eilis’s life, she agrees to this more out of passivity than out of passion. When she returns to Enniscorthy, she slowly begins to settle in at home again. A young man who ignored her before now pays her much attention. An employer that turned her down before now offers her a better paying job as an accountant. Her mother seems to assume that she will settle down in Enniscorthy. She puts off her return to New York again and again, in spite of Tony’s letters urging her to come back.

This all seemed quite pedestrian and predictable to me as I listened to the plot details and character concerns. The major attractions of the novel as a form—a sympathetic character with which the reader can identify, a fully realized geographical and social world the reader can recognize and live in, a plot with enough unpredictability to keep one turning the page—all seemed to be lacking in this novel. Quite frankly, it bored me. Just another immigration story.

But then, suddenly, as the story concludes, everything seems to tighten and pull together—not like a novel, but like a short story—and I was thrown back to the whole of the story and made to see everything in a new light. I began to realize that I had been listening to Brooklyn like a novel, while I should have been reading it like a short story. What I had missed in the listening, I would have caught in the reading—the precise, poetic style of the work, the careful creation of a literary world with a rhythm of reality all its own. The story is not a realistic novel about a particular woman in a particular time and particular place, but rather a lyrical tale about the universal dilemma of anyone who is displaced, tries to go home again but cannot, returns to the displacement, and finds out that neither the old home nor the new home feels like “home.” Brooklyn is a classic story of homesickness, a story that does not simply give a particular example of homesickness, but rather explores and defines the complexity of what that kind of sickness. As such, it is in the tradition of one of the most famous Irish stories, George Moore’s “Home Sickness.”

Frank O. Connor, in his great little book The Lonely Vlice, singles out "Home Sickness" as representative of the direction that the Irish short story would take in the twentieth century, arguing that it has the "absolute purity of the short story as opposed to the tale.” Although O'Connor says that as a piece of artistic organization, "Home Sickness" is perfect, one's first impression of the story is of its structural simplicity. James Bryden, an Irish immigrant who works in a bar in the Bowery, goes back to Ireland "in search of health," and for a short time considers marrying a peasant girl and remaining there. What unifies the story beyond its simple narrative structure is the understated but sustained tone throughout of Bryden's detachment from the reality of Irish life and his preference to live within a sort of reverie of nostalgia that he is disappointed to find unrealized in reality. He takes no interest in the life of the people and does not so much decide to marry Margaret Dirken as he passively allows the impending marriage to be announced.

Although Bryden finds himself longing for the Bowery as he contrasts the "weakness and incompetence of the people around him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind him," and although he blames the ignorance and primitive nature of the folk who cling to religious authority as his reason to return to America; the conclusion of the story suggests a more subtle and universal theme by unifying the detached dream-like mood of reverie that has been counterpointed throughout against Irish village reality. For the story is truly about the unbridgeable gap between restless reality and dream-like memory.

The style of the story shifts in the penultimate paragraph from what at first seems like a straightforward realistic presentation of Bryden's detached disappointment with Irish life to a compressed summary account of his ordinary and uneventful life in America. After his wife has died and his children are married, he sits in front of the fire, an old man, and "a vague, tender reverie" of Margaret floats up to his consciousness. "His wife and children passed out of mind, and it seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed, and the desire to see Margaret again grew intense."

The final lyrical paragraph of the story seems in sharp contrast to the realistic style of what has preceded it, in a way that is very similar to the contrast between realism and concluding lyricism that characterizes Joyce's "The Dead": "There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes around it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills."

However, as in "The Dead," the concluding lyrical style is not so much in contrast to the former style of the story as it first appears, for what Moore has accomplished is what characterizes the so-called "modern" style of Chekhov, Anderson, and Joyce. What seems to be mere verisimilitude in the story actually is a subtle development of a unified tone of reverie and memory that dominates the description of everyday reality. Although the story on the surface seems to focus on external reality, the real emphasis, as is so often the case with Chekhov and Joyce, is on inner life, for which the details of external reality are significant either only by contrast or as images of subjective reality. Although the concluding revelation of the "unchanging, silent life" of Bryden at first seems unprepared for, much as the lyrical evocation of Gabriel's life does in "The Dead," a closer look at the story reveals that the entire story is dominated by images that suggest the predominance of the subjective life of reverie and imagination over the ordinary life of the everyday.

Moore’s story is a classic of the short story as a genre, tightly wrought around a complex universal theme in which character and plot are in service of something larger than just “stuff that happens.” It is a talent that Colm Tóibín’s short stories seem to lack. His novel The Master won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and almost won the Booker in 2004, but his one collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons (2007) is comparatively flat and flaccid. He suggested in a London interview that it may be his last collection of stories, confessing, “I can’t write short stories.” Tóibín is not only a good novelist; he is also a good critic.

Although I was charmed by his restrained treatment of five challenging years in the life of Henry James, I was disappointed that Tóibín has not learned the “lesson of the master,” to wit, that the short story demands succinctness, that “it should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form.” With the exception of the final story, “A Long Winter,” a fine example of what James called his ideal, “the beautiful and blest nouvelle,” most of these stories suffer either from Tóibín’s underestimation or misunderstanding of the short story form. One problem may be the casual and calculated way the book originated. Tóibín has said that after the fluency of The Master he felt for a time that he had nothing; then some stories came to him: “A Song,” about a young man who hears his mother, who abandoned him as a child, sing, and “A Priest in the Family,” about an elderly mother whose son, a priest, is accused of abusing a young man.

Recovering a story he wrote in 1979, “A Journey,” about a mother driving her depressed son home from the hospital, he realized that the common theme of mother-son relationships might very well hold a book together. He then added the mother angle to two unfinished sketches--“The Name of the Game” and “The Use of Reason” to provide them with a conflict. All he needed now were a couple of new pieces: “Famous Blue Raincoat,” about a woman recalling her youthful experience singing in a band when her son discovers some of her old records, and “Three Friends,” about a young man who, after the death of his mother, attends a beach rave and has a homosexual experience with a friend.

In spite of the book’s overall intention, the individual stories fall short as individual stories. “The Song” focuses on a potentially powerful encounter, but since the reader cannot hear the song the mother sings and Tóibín’s prose here is too ordinary to capture the magic of that moment, the story lacks emotional impact. “The Name of the Game,” about a woman who has a gender and generational conflict with her son after salvaging a failing business left her by her husband, simply has no emotional core to sustain it. The issues at stake—the social pressures of a small Irish town—are too general and novelistic, and the story simply goes on too long about the specific steps the woman takes to make an economic success of the venture.

“Famous Blue Raincoat” tries to suggest the difference between old Ireland and the new economic Celtic Tiger—but lacks any compelling thematic or emotional connection between the past, which dominates most of the story, and the present, which serves as merely a convenient hook. “Three Friends,” another story about modern Ireland, also fails because it creates no compelling connection between the grief of the young man who has lost his mother and the sexual encounter he has with his friend. “A Priest in the Family is too obviously “ripped from the headlines,” featuring a thoroughly modern mother, age 80, who has learned to handled a VCR and email, but must find a way to face those who know that her son the priest is a pedophile.

“The Long Winter,” occupying one third of the book, is the best story here, and not just because of its length. Taking place in a rural village in the Pyrenees in Spain, it focuses on a young man whose mother has disappeared in a snowstorm. Based on a true story told to Tóibín by a man who sold him a house in Spain, the story has the formal control of folktale, ballad, myth. Tóibín, his own best critic, has called this his most powerful piece, recognizing that its purity of line and clarity of emotion places it in a different realm than the other stories. Tonally flawless and emotionally compelling, “The Long Winter,” a perfect example of James’s “beautiful and blest nouvelle,” alone is worth the price of Mothers and Sons.

If you have read Brooklyn, please let me know what you think.

A FOOTNOTE: Perhaps this is what bloggers with open blogs have to expect: I have received three or four "comments" that were links to porn sites and other such nonsense on some of my blogs. Consequently, you will see: "Comment deleted by moderator" on some of my recent blogs. Anyone have any advice on what else I can do to prevent this?