1. His name is one I can never say without feeling awkward. I think the correct pronunciation of it -- at least the one Tessa Hadley used at the event -- is COL-um tuh-BEAN, but it sounds a bit pretentious to say it that way (like referring to 'Paree' or 'Firenze' without a hint of irony), yet ignorant to say it any differently. I wonder if Tessa Hadley checked with him about how to pronounce it at the event. I'm glad it wasn't me. I'd have probably stood there in an agonising dilemma, because on the one hand he probably gets asked that all the time and finds it annoying, but on the other hand saying it wrong in front of 570 people (a sell-out audience at the RBS Main Theatre) would be pretty embarrassing too. It was already warm enough in there without having a hot flush of mortification to deal with.
It's about an Irish girl, Eilis, in the 1950s, who moves to Brooklyn to seek her fortune. It's all very understated -- no AS Byatt-type encyclopaedic detail, no Madeline Miller-type syrupy-pseudo-poetry, to name a couple of recent prize-winning authors -- and it's very hard to put your finger on what makes it so good. It is precise, it is compassionate as Tolstoy and Hardy and Henry James are (James being a particular love of Tóibín's), and it is balanced; Eilis is non-judgmental and non-aggressive, but both of these qualities appear more as absences than anything else, because she is also incredibly passive. There is tragedy, but Tóibín writes about it as something essentially low-key, banal, and to be expected.
He has the same clear sight and light touch in The Master, and I noticed it again in a story called 'A Priest in the Family', which comes from his collection Mothers and Sons and which I found in the anthology The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. It concerns an old woman, Molly, who discovers that her son, a Catholic priest, is about to go on trial for child abuse. The passages of dialogue almost reach a Hemingway-like level of minimalism because of the lack of interiority -- she only reflects when alone, and not even very deeply then -- which, along with the ingenious decision to focus on the mother, makes the story really quite chilling.3. His approach to talking about books is one I find extremely sympathetic, and one that was reinforced by his conversation with Tessa Hadley (see previous post). They were trying to search for a word that described the variations in tone and colour that make up a work of literature. They went through 'aesthetic' and 'pattern' before eventually hitting on 'texture'. This word quite rightly brought out the curious sensation that reading feels physical -- it has a rhythm which is not quite the same thing as the speed at which you are reading it. It is to do with the interaction between the words, the eye, the brain, and the white space around the paragraphs. Ending a paragraph with the sentence "It was over" is quite different to beginning a paragraph in the same way. I think it was this sensation they were trying to pin down.
Tóibín teaches a class at Columbia University, where he is Mellon Professor, and explained to an amused audience that he tells all students, even the ones with "massive PhDs", to leave all literary theory at the door. To students who drawl that they can only read in a Lacanian way, he responds like an Irish fishwife: "Not in here, you won't." Saying this, his rather geometric approach to texts, looking for patterns and so on, sounds quite narratological in its method. He explained that in The Portrait of a Lady and Mansfield Park, amongst other novels, the fact that the heroine does not have parents both allows and forces her to come into her own, and thus the story is born. (This is particularly true of the silly or dead mothers in Jane Austen, where aunts and sisters tend to be more important.)
Pressing his Russian Formalist-style musings further, he proposed that it was irrelevant for readers to say they 'liked' or 'disliked' characters in novels: the character serves a function in the novel and is not there to excite that kind of emotion. This sounds a very ascetic approach to reading, and one that a great many readers will surely disagree with, but I see his point. A character is necessary to the novel; there's no point complaining to a novelist that the character isn't this or that. Assuming some competence on the part of the novelist, changing the character would take it away from the novel that the novelist wanted to write.
Focusing on only the text is very out of fashion nowadays, but I admire Tóibín's approach because it encourages extended and careful reflection on the craft with which a text has been put together, and I don't think extended and careful reflection on anything can be a bad thing. Nor is he blinkered: his new book, New Ways To Kill Your Mother, is a series of essays on the relationships between writers and their parents (Yeats and his father, J.M. Synge and his mother, and so on). Clearly, he appreciates the value of biography, and probably more than many.Tóibín has a long-term interest in parental-filial relationships, judging by the title of Mothers and Sons (2006), which some might slyly suggest is typical of a gay, solitary man. However true this may be, he is a superb writer, who displays a wonderful slow generosity when being interviewed, and makes you feel that he really does understand the slow, minute pains associated with being alive. Perhaps he gives a faint impression that he feels more pain than most, for whatever reason; but he's clearly doing what he loves best of all, and he does it with a modest virtuosity that continues to inspire and excite me.
(The next few posts will focus on a different theme, which is as yet undecided. Never say I'm not helpful.)
