Mum on the mind

>> Colm Tóibín captures exquisite Irish misery in his new collection of shorts, Mothers and Sons

by JULIET WATERS

The Irish, according to a famous statement by Freud, are the one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. This may explain why Colm Tóibín, author of Mothers and Sons, hates talking about his own mother. At a Toronto reading recently, Tóibín was asked about this relationship and his response was basically, that’s none of your business. In the New York Times, Stanley Fish devoted an entire column to Tóibín’s uncomfortable appearance on a radio talk show on which he was clearly uninterested in a) talking about his own mother, and b) listening to stories about other people’s Irish mothers. He was equally uncomfortable with any discussion that looks to literature as part of a healing process. Colm Tóibín bears little resemblance to those writers like Frank McCourt who have made more than a cottage industry out of tales about their hardcore Irish mum.

This may also explain why this collection is so superb. Happy lives do not make for good stories, which is why the Irish have a tendency to treasure their psychic wounds. Tóibín’s collection reads like an anthropological exhibit of exquisite Irish misery. No mention of The Troubles here. This is southern Ireland, anyway. Crime, capitalism and designer drugs are the challenges most of these characters deal with. And of course their damn mothers. Anyone looking for a clue to the character of Tóibín’s own mother isn’t going to find it among the rich range of maternal characters he’s created. Drunk barfly mothers who don’t know when to shut up. Brilliant musical mothers who move audiences to tears and leave their abandoned sons cold. Taciturn, business-minded mothers who keep their agendas closely guarded. Dead mothers, absent mothers, mothers who make and mothers who contemptuously reject a cup of tea as a solution to every problem.

Tóibín’s sons are equally diverse. They range from chronic depressives to helpless partiers. The story “Three Friends” works both as a Dublin riff on Y Tu Mamá También and a homoerotic re-imagining of the W.B. Yeats poem, “Who Goes With Fergus.”

The most compelling son, however, remains the nameless central character in “The Use of Reason.” The story opens with this master burglar meditating on the emptiness of the houses and the businesses he robs. Like many characters in these stories, voids are seen as sanctuaries, rather than prisons. All his life, he has been subjected to negligent, fraudulent parental figures. From his alcoholic mother to the lecherous, abusive priests who run the juvenile home where he was sent. So complex and fraught with terror are his relationships that when he is faced with a fairly straightforward business transaction, one that would liberate him and his family from a life of crime, he is suddenly paralyzed. Even when escape is offered to him, it is clear that he will choose only prison or burial.

Burial is a recurring theme throughout Mothers and Sons. Characters are compelled by deep, dark places. A photographer mourns the disappearance of the dark room, as digital photography makes that process obsolete. Her son, it turns out, has been burrowing in her old boxes discovering secrets she would prefer to keep to her grave. Another mother loves the winter and detests the summer, when dark thoughts come upon her. No doubt she too has a trauma that is locked deep beneath a strict structure of small town rituals. The kind of trauma that might explain why her estranged son has been charged with repeated counts of child abuse. What this trauma is we’ll never know. Tóibín feels no obligation to reveal all his characters’ secrets any more than he does his own. Like the country where most of these characters live, a clear choice has been made to bury the past for as long as it will stay buried.

MOTHERS AND SONS BY COLM TÓIBÍN,
HC, M&S, 309PP, $29.99.