Nora Webster

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Colm Tóibín is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, his most recent novel; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York. Nora Webster, Tóibín's new novel, draws on his memories of his father's death – in doing so, it joins a rich tradition of writing about loss, from Sophocles to Joan Didion

I began my novel Nora Webster in the spring of 2000. Even though I wrote other books over the next thirteen and a half years, I added to Nora Webster every year, or deleted something from it. I thought about it almost every day. Although some of the details are invented, including the details of the place where Nora goes to work, there is nothing invented about the atmosphere in the house in the small town where myself and my younger brother lived with my mother in the years after my father died. Unlike Eilis Lacey, Nora does not cross the Atlantic, she learns to sing. The discovery of music in her life gives her “a line towards brightness, or some beginning”, writes Tóibín, a master of less is more. At the same time, because he is also exploring Ireland at a crossroads, an infinitely fascinating web of allusion, taut with nuance and subtlety, and because no Irish writer returning to his or her homeland can ever quite step out of Joyce’s shadow, Nora Webster carries a burden of detail missing from Brooklyn. Put simply, Tóibín’s novel contains an awful lot of its author and his resonant sonority. This cuts both ways, good and bad. Meanwhile, Nora can’t stop thinking about Maurice and how much she needs him. Unable to imagine her life improving, she feels her best days are behind her. Seeing how much she’s struggling, Maurice’s family offers her money. They pay for Fiona’s training and they help Aine with her fees. Nora thinks she is a bad mother because she can’t look after her own children.

Nora Webster

The novelists have become characters in their own books. By the urgency of the tone, they make clear, however, that, in the aftermath of loss, nothing they can invent compares to it. And that, since they are writers, what happened needs to be written down so that it can be known and shared and understood, so that it can lose its incoherence. And so that they, in their powerlessness and helplessness, can at least still do this, can at least write down what it was like. When we are told, en passant, about “Catholics marching for civil rights”, another character remarks: “That’s one scrap I wouldn’t like to be in. There will be no easy way out of that one.” But, as every historical novelist knows, lines loaded with history will always be at odds with the quest for “truth in the simplest detail”. Later, after another reference to “baton-charges”, we hear about the young Charles Haughey and his gun running. Then, towards the end, comes news of Bloody Sunday. For a decade I thought about the book at some point every day. I worked out a structure. Slowly, the character of Nora Webster herself began to emerge for me more clearly. I wanted her to be both brave and difficult, to be someone fiercely loyal to her children when there was a crisis, but oddly nonchalant in the ordinary course of events. Her sisters were afraid of her. There is a sense of her as trapped by her circumstances, in a small town. I enjoyed this quiet and unassuming novel, watching Nora and the boys change as Nora learns to live her own life. I loved the moment, three years later, when she realizes she can do what she wants now, that there is no one who can tell her she can't. In this case, it was about redecorating her home. I loved the two boys, they too change in many ways, but the youngest watches closely everything that goes on. It takes great skill as a writer to make the most common events interesting and for me this author did just that. I had read a good deal of her work by the time I saw her. Some of her stories meant nothing to me. The scenes of upper middle-class life in County Meath, north of Dublin, were too rarefied. But the ones that dealt with the life of a widow were almost too close to the space between how we lived then in our house and what was unmentionable – the business of silence around grief, the life of a woman alone, the palpable absence of a man, a husband, a father, our father, my father, the idea of conversation as a way of concealing loss rather than revealing anything, least of all feeling – for me not to have read her with full recognition. The recognition was so clear, in fact, that I do not remember recognising anything. I was reading with too much rawness.

Although Nora loves her children, she’s consumed by her grief and doesn’t give them the attention they need. The children all miss their father, but they miss Nora just as much because she shuts them out. Everyone in the family craves some normality and emotional stability, but unfortunately, things are about to get worse for the Websters.Morales, Macey (8 April 2015). "ALA unveils shortlist for 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction". American Library Association . Retrieved 7 January 2022. I thought at first of writing the book from my own perspective, rather than my mother's, but when I tried to set some of that down, I found there was nothing, or not enough for a novel. It was as though the experience had hollowed me out and was, from my perspective, too filled with silence and distance for me to be able to harness it for a novel's purposes. Having never struggled for money, Kavanagh doesn’t understand Nora’s problems. Nora thinks Kavanagh is spoiled and privileged. In the meantime, Fiona needs money to finish her teacher training, and Aine doesn’t know how she’ll graduate university without money to pay tuition fees. Nora knows that, however much she despises Kavanagh, she needs this job to keep her family afloat. Brown, Mark (18 November 2014). "Costa 2014 book awards shortlist includes first novel by ex-Mormon". the Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2022. But I must have sat up when I came to this passage in Lavin's story "Happiness": "When Father went to hospital Mother went with him and stayed in a small hotel across the street so she could be with him all day from early to late. 'Because it was so awful for him, being in Dublin,' she said. 'You have no idea how he hated it.' Maybe I thought this would be in other books in the future – such a precise image of what had happened to us – but I never found it again. It was only there. It is in the novel I have written, Nora Webster, but it took me a long time to find a dramatic form for those words.

Slowly, his name ceased to be mentioned in the house. CS Lewis has a description of the same silence after his wife's death: "I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my mother's death when my father mentioned her. I can't blame them. It's the way boys are." I wrote the first chapter of my novel Nora Webster in the spring of 2000, in the same season as I wrote the first chapter of The Master, my novel about Henry James. Both books dealt with a protagonist over four or five years. Alone in the world, both James and Nora Webster attempted to find a way out of failure or grief or loss. Although The Master required a great deal of research and Nora Webster almost none, I found The Master easier to work on, and easier to finish.

The book came as the result of a battle between the night and the day. At night I would think of a scene that might work in the book. By the time I went to sleep I almost had it ready for the morning. In the morning, however, it did not pass the unforgiving test called the hard light of day.