Mothers and Sons [Paperback]

One of our most intensely refined and challenging writers of the day, Colm Tóibín presents a new set of nine short stories correlated by the theme and title of mothers and sons, stories that mine the always fascinating relationship between mothers and sons, both positive and negative sides. This is writing of such apparent simplicity that the craftsmanship of his work is taken for granted - the mark of a truly fine writer. Here is a collection of stories to be read slowly, allowing time to digest each experience fully before moving on to the next.

'The Use of Reason' explores a son's theft of valuable art and the consequences of his actions result in a confrontation with his alcoholic mother that supercedes the criminal act. In the brief 'The Song' a young musician almost mistakenly hears his miscreant mother singing a ballad that should erase years of desertion just as in 'Famous Blue Raincoat' the son discovers songs his mother recorded with her hippie sister before disaster struck the drug-impacted band. In 'The Name of the Game' a mother attempts to recover the errors of her deceased husband in making a life for her son, unknowingly at odds with her son's true needs and goals. A mother faces the infamy of her priest son when his history of sexual abuse surfaces in 'A Priest in the Family', and in 'A Summer Job' the devotion of a son to his grandmother overshadows his relationship to his mother. In 'Three Friends' and 'A Long Winter' Tóibín delicately and with subtle sensitivity introduces same sex themes to embroider stories of strong and powerful tales. For this reader 'A Long Winter' (the longest of the stories) is so excellent it could be stretched into an entire novel!

Tóibín finds unique lines of communication among his characters, some with words, others with quiescent descriptors, and the flow of his use of the English language peppered with bits and pieces of both Irish culture and Spanish concepts (in 'The Long Winter') is lyrical, pungent and abundantly enriching to read. His mind is fertile and his style of writing is full of grace and feeling. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, January 07

I realise that I'll undoubtedly be shot down in flames for daring to criticize this book but I must be true to my own feelings on it, as must any honest reviewer. This is a collection of short stories, set mainly in Ireland and with that overlying sadness that seems inevitable in Irish tales. The relationships between the mothers and sons are all different but all have an unbreakable link between them that survives, even when things are at their worst. Other reviewers have listed the stories in detail...the drug fueled rave, following the mother's funeral, the blind love which excuses the paedophilic priest etc. so I won't rehash them. Admittedly the writing is that of a master craftsman, polished to perfection and as precise as the work of a great artist, but I simply didn't enjoy the book, feeling a great cloud of depression fall over me..perhaps it's just that the Irish melancholy got too much for me!

There's little doubt that Irish culture holds in considerable regard the ability to tell an absorbing tale. The country's literature boasts a rich tradition of compelling short story writers --- among them James Joyce, Frank O'Connor and the modern master, William Trevor. Fresh from his acclaimed novel of the life of Henry James, THE MASTER, Colm Tóibín, in his first collection of short fiction, shows that he has the talent to someday join their august company.

MOTHERS AND SONS recognizes that perhaps no other family relationship is more fraught with the tension between intimacy and distance than this one. In the thematically linked stories of this collection, all but one of which are set in modern-day Ireland, Tóibín chooses to emphasize the circumstances that isolate mothers and sons and the failures of communication that often make it impossible to bridge that gap.

The stories in MOTHERS AND SONS don't feature much in the way of dramatic action and tend to be somewhat monochromatic in their tone and pacing. What Tóibín offers that more than compensates for these shortcomings is his gift for sharp and often painful glimpses into the lives of characters struggling to deal with the harsh reality life has handed them. Typical of these insights is the one that appears at the conclusion of "A Journey," the shortest story in the collection. There, Sally contemplates the grim scene that confronts her when she returns home with her 20-year-old son who's been hospitalized for depression, and enters the bedroom where her husband lies crippled from a stroke. Examining herself in the mirror and deciding from that glance to let her hair go gray, Sally is "struck for a moment by a glimpse of a future in which she would need to muster every ounce of selfishness she had."

Among the most poignant stories in the book is "Famous Blue Raincoat." In it, a teenage boy discovers some albums recorded by a Dublin folk-rock band in which his mother and late aunt sang in the early '70s. Hoping to please his mother, he transfers the albums to CDs, but instead evokes for her only the memories of her sister's mysterious death. "Now, as the CD came to an end," Tóibín writes, "she hoped she would never have to listen to it again."

In "A Priest in the Family," Tóibín skillfully undermines the clichéd portrayal of an aging Irish mother doting on her son who has decided to join the priesthood. In its place, he offers the story of Molly, still vigorous in her late 70s, as she drives a car and works to master the Internet, but who's "not sure" she believes in the power of prayer. When Molly learns that her son Frank, a local parish priest, is about to go on trial for sexual abuse of some former students, the tragic circumstances provide them with an opportunity for a kind of reconciliation.

The collection's final story, the novella-length "A Long Winter," is the only one that doesn't take place in Ireland. Set in a village in Spain's Pyrenees Mountains, it chronicles the disappearance of a woman who abandons her unnamed husband and son Miquel, when the husband resorts to harsh measures to halt her problem drinking. She is caught in a blizzard that blows into the region a few hours after she leaves home on foot, and most of the story recounts Miquel's search for her, alternating between the fading hope that she will be found alive and his fear that her body finally will be discovered, devoured by vultures, when the snow melts.

In each of these stories, Tóibín's prose is controlled and burnished. Only a mature, self-assured writer would launch the first story in the collection, "The Use of Reason," with sentences like these --- repetitive, and yet brilliant in their repetition: "The city was a great emptiness. He looked out from the balcony of one of the top flats on Charlemont Street. The wide waste ground below him was empty. He closed his eyes and thought about the other flats on this floor, most of them empty now in the afternoon, just as the little bare bathrooms were empty and the open stairwells were empty."

At the midpoint of his career, Colm Tóibín has demonstrated his ability to master a variety of literary forms. With MOTHERS AND SONS, readers can add the short story to that list and can only look forward to the next offering of this accomplished author.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

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