First things first: author Colm Tóibín's
New Ways to Kill Your Mother
is no lightweight, frothy summer beach read, so be prepared for that. He's an Irish novelist, essayist, journalist, critic, short story writer, playwright, journalist, critic, and, more recently, a poet. Described recently as an "old-fashioned literary man o' war," he is generally regarded by those familiar with his works as having outclassed many at the various literary forms in which he has delved.
Though the title might suggest a manual about matricide, Tóibín's new work is not about the act of murdering one's own mother. The author skillfully delves into the association between the portrayal of family relations in literature and the actual home lives of writers, and it can be as complex as it is absorbing. The title is metaphorical.
The relationship between writers, their chosen occupation and the part that it plays with their families is often like combat. It is to this absorbing topic that author Tóibín turns in his interesting collection of essays on writers and their mothers, fathers and other family members. Early into the book we see these words:
"The novel in English over the nineteenth century is filled with parents whose influence must be evaded or erased to be replaced by figures who operate either literally or figuratively as aunts, both kind and mean, both well-intentioned and duplicitous, both rescuing and destroying. The novel is a form ripe for orphans, or for those whose orphanhood will be all the more powerful for being figurative, or open to the suggestion, both sweet and sour, of surrogate parents."
After an interesting opening section with a look at Jane Austen, Henry James and s bit more, we find Tóibín's work arranged in two parts. In "Ireland", he reflects on the work of W.B. Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Brian Moore, Sebastian Barry and others. He writes about Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever in "Elsewhere," ending that section with some insight into the writings of James Baldwin and Barack Obama:
"James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955, begins: `On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died.' Baldwin was almost nineteen at the time. Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, begins also with the death of his father: `A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.'"
As seen in that passage, the title of this book can be misleading, as Tóibín's essays are quite often concerned with the role of the father as much as the mother.
A good number of the essays found here were originally published in periodicals, including the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Dublin Review, as is noted in the author's acknowledgements in the back of this book.
Colm Tóibín as the essayist reflects a certain asceticism, but he's as crafty a storyteller as Tóibín the novelist. For the reader, his most highly regarded fiction,
The Blackwater Lightship
,
The Master
, and
The Heather Blazing
, generally build up with a slow but sure gathering of events. There becomes a point with his novels that the reader becomes engaged, and it's this skilful cumulative result that makes his novels seem most believable. This reader had admittedly found Tóibín's highly acclaimed
Brooklyn
to be a "one-dimensional disappointment" when reviewed in 2009, but after reading his latest, it's a compelling thought to give that novel a second look.
Again,
New Ways to Kill Your Mother
is no simple summer beach read. But when you feel that your brain cells have been almost destroyed by the likes of the 'everyone-is-talking-about-it'
Fifty Shades of Drivel
series (and apologies if you're a die-hard fan), Colm Tóibín's 5-star book may go a long way to being cathartic, if only for the healing effect it will have on your thinking process.
6/20/2012
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Unexpectadly brilliant.
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