Tag Archives: Colm Toíbín

Portrait of a Gentleman: The Master

31 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: The Master, by Colm Toíbín
Scribner, 2004. 339 pp. $17

Around the turn of the twentieth century, two famous brothers, Henry and William James, converse in Henry’s seaside home in Rye, East Sussex. William, philosopher, psychologist, and lecturer (in public life and private), says, “Harry, I find I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean. In this crowded and hurried reading age you will remain unread and neglected as long as you continue to indulge in this style and these subjects.”

Even — especially — as an admirer of Henry James, I have to laugh. I used to share William’s criticism of his brother’s prose, as probably many readers do today. But in this biographical novel of an author perhaps more closely attuned to social nuance and unspoken truth than any other of English expression, James’s world opens up with impressive clarity, poignancy, and depth. You see how the master thinks, observes, derives his fictions, absorbs tragedy and setbacks and — always tentatively — ventures beyond himself, almost invariably to retreat.

The great writer as a boy alongside his father, Henry, Sr., whose influence loomed large. From an 1854 daguerrotype by Mathew Brady (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Consequently, The Master delivers the story of how a writer’s mind works, the stuff that anyone who writes will recognize — the bits of life that beg to be set down, impatience for tiresome guests to depart so that you can get to work, the pains of failure, the glories when a reader picks up your work for the first time and tells you how much she likes it. (Notice how long my sentences are getting; be it known that Toíbín’s aren’t, for he hasn’t tried to write James, only about him.) But there’s much more, for Toíbín focuses on how a man who observes so keenly often remains an observer, and why. James’s fear of emotional entrapment conveys a figure who feels constantly under siege, though he might not say so. He worries that the world he knows is fast disappearing.

There’s little plot in The Master, yet there’s much activity, all laden with meaning. As the novel begins in 1895, Henry tries to circumvent his anxieties about the first performance of his play in London by attending a nearby theater showing Oscar Wilde’s comic drama, An Ideal Husband. James, who could be a prig, finds Wilde’s work completely vulgar and resents his success, more so after his own play fails miserably. But months later, when Wilde sues his lover’s father for slander over accusations of homosexuality, James takes a renewed interest in Wilde. It’s not schadenfreude but the first intimation that James has homosexual attractions and desires he’s never acted on.

Throughout, Toíbín handles that theme with the delicacy befitting his protagonist. How sad that this man, whose instincts are kindly and sensitive, who has many friends who clamor for his company, who understands children and easily befriends them, suppresses the longing that might have made him happier. Granted, no one’s more keenly aware of societal disapproval and pressure than Henry James, yet you sense that tact and discretion might have permitted more leeway than he allows himself.

But Toíbín also reveals Henry’s less attractive facets, such as his selfish refusal to help a couple dear friends in dire need. Or, earlier in his life, how his parents somehow decide the Civil War has nothing to do with him—startling, considering that the Jameses are staunch New England abolitionists, as are their friends. Two of Henry’s brothers enlist and serve as officers in a famous Black regiment; one is grievously wounded.

Those failures point to how his parents have arranged Henry’s life for him (and William’s, to some extent), though it’s Henry who never escapes that confinement. As he muses over the body of his only, beloved sister, who’s just died, he realizes what a circumscribed life they have both led:

Her face changed as the light changed. She seemed young and old, exhausted and quite utterly beautiful. . . . He and his sister would die childless; what they owned was theirs only while they lived. There would be no direct heirs. They had both recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the warmth of love. They had never wanted it. He felt they had both been banished, sent into exile, left alone, while their siblings had married and their parents had followed one another into death. Sadly and tenderly, he touched her cold, composed hands.

The Master may not be for everybody. But you don’t have to be a fan of Henry James to appreciate its breadth and poignancy.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

House of Atreus, Revisited: House of Names

12 Monday Jun 2017

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Review: House of Names,by Colm Tóibín
Scribner, 2017. 275 pp. $26

Agamemnon, waiting with his army for a fair wind for Troy, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods. That act sets in motion a blood-will-have-blood intrigue that throws Mycenae’s House of Atreus into turmoil and evokes moral issues that inspired all three tragic dramatists of ancient Athens: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Iphigenia in Tauris, as a priestess of Artemis, sets out to greet her brother, Orestes, and his friend, Pylades; fresco from Pompeii, 1st century C.E. (Naples National Archeological Museum, courtesy May Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons)

Here, Tóibín has departed from the script in an always riveting but occasionally portentous narrative, and the result is a mixed success. As befits its sources, House of Names offers plenty of deep themes, and these intense, jittery Mycenaean royalty have enough ambitions, fears, and rough edges to give those themes superb scope. The story, though familiar, feels fresh, partly through reinterpretation, but largely because Tóibín knows how to evoke corners and wrinkles of character that add tension. Even though you know what happens next, you have room to hope that it won’t go that way, and he subtly encourages this delusion until it’s too late.

The novel opens with Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s queen, narrating how her husband lures her and their daughter, Iphigenia, to his camp on the pretext that the girl was to marry Achilles. I like this section very much. Not only does Tóibín craft the warrior king into a weakling, a vacuous coward who can’t even bring the news himself, an unspeakable father to a daughter who adores him, the women attempt to resist and are crushed as if they were insects. The feminist message comes through loud and clear, but there’s more.

Clytemnestra, whom literature has long stereotyped as a bloodthirsty fiend who knows nothing beyond her treasonous lusts and desire for revenge–a misogynistic portrait, if ever there was one–receives a measure of rehabilitation in House of Names. It’s not just that Tóibín plumbs how deeply her daughter’s sacrifice shakes her emotionally. It’s that the brutality pushes her to declare, privately, that if the gods in fact demanded Iphigenia’s death–which Clytemnestra doubts–that only proves their irrelevance.

I know as no one else knows that the gods are distant, they have other concerns. They care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree. I know the leaves are there, they wither and grow again and wither, as people come and live and then are replaced by others like them. There is nothing I can do to help them or prevent their withering. I do not deal with their desires.

But this being the House of Atreus, Clytemnestra doesn’t stop at philosophy. She swears revenge and spends the years of her husband’s absence planning how to carry it out. When Agamemnon finally comes home from Troy, Clytemnestra murders him and gives out that a rebel faction within the palace was responsible. To accomplish this, she has enlisted Aegisthus, a powerful, unscrupulous man who has own scores to settle, and, she finds, no desire to share power or anything else except her bed–and others’. Clytemnestra has miscalculated by a long shot.

And that too is a theme–how, when killing starts, it doesn’t stop. Electra, her younger daughter, swears revenge in turn, and from her narrative sections, you see that she too wants power. Whereas Clytemnestra loved Iphigenia and, once, her husband, Electra doesn’t seem to love anybody. But she hates her mother, to the point that she blames her for Iphigenia’s death. Clytemnestra has done serious wrongs, but Electra’s approach tells you that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Amid all them is Orestes, Clyemnestra’s son, who grows up an exile and yearns to return home. Again, unlike the classic treatment, this Orestes isn’t a natural leader, an outraged son who demands his birthright. In fact, he’s a born follower and wants to do right, whatever that might be. He has only two desires–to find love and not to be shunted aside. His is the saddest, most poignant perspective in the novel, a balance to the mayhem in which he must participate.

Having loved Nora Webster–and held up its prose as a model for my own writing–I’m startled to say that Tóibín’s style in House of Names fails to measure up. The language seems excessively formal, and therefore often distant; for instance, the author never uses contractions and often adds needless prepositional phrases that make people sound pompous. Sometimes, they speak as if they knew a scribe were in the room, taking dictation for posterity. The rhythm, too, becomes annoyingly noticeable in places, as with the short, choppy sentences in Clytemnestra’s voice.

But my biggest complaint, one that surprises me, is the sheer number of “he felt, she felt.” Tóibín didn’t do that in Nora Webster, a novel remarkable for its artistry in conveying inner life through subtext and by inference, with nary a cliché. Compare that with an example here, “He veered between feeling brave and feeling nervous,” and you see the difference.

As a novel of ideas and a retelling of a powerful story, House of Names is worth reading. But it’s disappointing, nevertheless.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

This Blog Is One Year Old Today

27 Tuesday Oct 2015

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A year ago today, I published my first review as Novelhistorian. My thanks go to all my readers, regular or casual, with a special nod to those who’ve graced their visits with commentary. Without all of you, this blog wouldn’t exist. Thank you again.

When I was growing up in the New York area, a local TV channel broadcast Million Dollar Movie, a program that showed a single film continuously for hours at a stretch. The theme song, as I only found out years later, was from Gone With the Wind; I still think of it as belonging to the TV program. The movies were generally the swash-and-buckle type, like Scaramouche or The Crimson Pirate (Burt Lancaster in a title role he probably preferred to forget). It’s thanks to Million Dollar Movie that I can quote stretches of Duck Soup, without which my education would have been incomplete, or vividly recall James Cagney playing George M. Cohan and Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.

Each showing of a movie closed with the voiceover, “If you missed any part of ________ or would like to see it again, stay tuned after these messages.”

So that’s what I’m offering you today. After reading about a hundred books the past year, the following dozen are the ones that have stayed with me most clearly and probably will for awhile. And if you missed my reviews (or care to read them again), here they are, in recap, with links, following the order in which I published them.

The Lie, by Helen Dunmore, recounts the painful, tragic struggle of an English veteran of the First World War who returns to his village and tries to make a life. The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew W. Taylor, involves an eighteenth-century amateur sleuth who must combat superstition, class prejudice, and political influence to solve a murder–and grows as a person in the process.

The Dream Maker, by Jean-Christophe Rufin, is a gripping tale about Jacques Coeur, the fifteenth-century French merchant who not only helped Charles VII transform his country but conceived of power as stemming from knowledge, a revolutionary idea. I Am Abraham is Jerome Charyn’s stirring portrayal of Lincoln as a man conscious of his physical ugliness and tortured by loneliness and desire as he tries to find his way.

An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris’s novel about the Dreyfus Affair, is more than an intensely compelling story about the most infamous political scandal in nineteenth-century French history (and there were many). It’s also the gold standard for thrillers. The Ten Thousand Things, John Spurling’s novel about Yuan Dynasty China, explores art, sex, love, justice, and politics–you know, the important stuff. For the record, it won this year’s Walter Scott Prize. Colm Toíbín’s subtle, probing Nora Webster, set in 1960s Ireland, takes a commonplace subject, widowhood, and makes it into literary art of the first order.

Jazz Palace, Mary Morris’s lovely rendition of Chicago jazz during the Twenties, captures the era and two of its walking wounded in a hard-edged, deeply felt romance. In The Promise, Ann Weisgarber spins a keenly observed, taut love story of 1900 Galveston, about two people who can see past surfaces and the jealousies that surround them.

The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami, follows the disastrous sixteenth-century Narváez expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, as viewed by its most adept (but socially and culturally invisible) member. Lily King’s Euphoria follows a love triangle among anthropologists in New Guinea in 1931, based on Margaret Mead’s life, in a retelling of exceptional breadth, psychological insight, and power.

Finally, The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks’s recent novel, recounts the rise of King David, as told by his prophet and trusted adviser, Natan. Like The Dream Maker, I Am Abraham, and An Officer and a Spy, Brooks manages to infuse edge-of-the-seat tension into a narrative whose events are no surprise.

Here’s to another year of good reading.

A Widow Finds Her Voice: Nora Webster

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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Review: Nora Webster, by Colm Toíbín
Scribner, 2014. 373 pp. $27
When I first started reading Nora Webster, I wondered whether it deserved to be called a historical novel. Now that I’ve finished it, I think that in its masterful subtlety and understatement, the book ranks among the best historical fiction I’ve read in a while.

The flap copy actually undersells Nora Webster, odd as that sounds. Scribner would have us believe it’s a story about a newly widowed Irishwoman in her forties, trying to cope with loss, loneliness, and her struggles to raise four children on her meager savings. But it’s also how Nora, paralleling the feminist movement of the late 1960s–which seeps into the narrative around the edges–literally and figuratively finds her own voice.

Tower in Wexford, Ireland, 2008. (Courtesy Ian Murphy; public domain in the U.S.)

Tower in Wexford, Ireland, 2008. (Courtesy Ian Murphy; public domain in the U.S.)

At the start, Nora’s preoccupied with fending off well-wishers who continue to press her with platitudes about Maurice, her late husband, who died a few months before. In this small town in County Wexford, not only does everyone know everyone else’s business, they consider it their right to judge it, from clothes to hairstyles to whatever they assume is right and proper. Nora suffers intensely from scrutiny, real or imagined, and–in the beginning–curbs herself to try to avoid it, partly by putting up with the intrusion.

As with everything about her, you see many sides, not all of them sympathetic–her desperate need to grieve by herself; her passivity at allowing anyone to interrupt; her anger at herself for it; her self-absorption, which costs her children, especially her two young sons; and the patronizing way her relatives try to fix her life. They even have good ideas, and the money to implement them, which forces Nora to choose between accepting needed help or insisting on her independent authority.

However, there’s much more. She notices, for the first time, how her sisters pay close attention to whatever a man says, never fussing or trying to do two tasks at once while he speaks, as they would if it were only Nora. To these women, she’s not really there, she realizes. Further, when the conversation turns to politics, one sister asks the men what they think, but nobody ever asks her, though she has strong opinions. Maurice never asked her either, apparently, which makes Nora wonder whether she’ll be speaking up more, now that he’s gone.

Oh, yes, she will. Nora can be oppositional and intimidating, so much so that she’s scared her children, who talk more openly with their aunts and uncles. Gradually, however, she turns her strength toward what she wants and believes in, despite what others may say or think. Much is happening in Ireland–killings between Catholic and Protestant, protesters beaten or killed, demands for better working and living conditions, voices raised for feminism. And Nora’s television is always on, bringing news of change into her household. So when she returns to the job she once held before her marriage, she’s no longer the pushover she once was, and even joins a union. Toíbín is too good a novelist to make this transition simple–Nora scuffles with herself, endlessly–but she sheds her reticence and expands her life.

Most significantly, Nora has always had a fine singing voice but never trained or used it. Now she does, taking lessons from a woman whom everyone else finds too eccentric; in fact, all Nora’s new friends have that reputation. It’s the perfect metaphor to describe Nora’s life as a widow: For once, she has found her own voice, and damn the gossips.

Colm Toíbín has written a lovely, moving novel about a woman suffering through heartbreak, but also a novel about the 1960s that feels lived in (and much more satisfying than Cementville, which I reviewed earlier this week). What a story.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.