Nora Webster

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Emotions dart, fresh longings emerge; what her characters do can easily become irrational and hard to explain; they often do the very opposite of what they intend. Toibin has created one of contemporary fiction's most memorable female characters, one who has the strength and depth of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Where it says in this novel that “she knew so much about people in the town,” I scrawled a big question mark in the margin. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father.

Nora’s Uncle Jim was on the anti-Treaty side in the Irish civil war, and was temporarily interned by the Free State government. Nora’s imperfect yet instinctive empathy will be broken into pieces; as it is, she is straining, oscillating between strength and passivity, holding things together, barely managing to interpret the silences, the boys bewilderment, the girls’ burgeoning adulthood and their desire for a frank and mature flow of information. Tóibín knows the claustrophobic dimensions of this world, but he also appreciates the vanished courtesies and intimacies it offered residents.

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An odd by-product of my loss is that I'm aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet … Some funk it altogether. After her exchange with Sister Thomas, her life begins to find its bearings in exactly that terrain. Apparently, Colm Tóibín wrote the first chapter of 'Nora Webster' in the spring of 2000, but didn't get to complete it fully until September 2013. Becoming "bewildering and cruel", as Carson puts it, and "bizarre", are what has happened to his personality under pressure.

Tóibín also knows that when it comes to expressing ‘the within of things’ – to borrow a phrase from Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic paleontologist whose influence in the Vatican II era is evident in the milieu of this book – social realism can be as sharp and as subtle a mode as there is.

As the days unfold, concern about Aine’s disappearance converts infamous events into a closely felt crisis. There is nothing experimental or difficult about it – nothing difficult for the reader that is; the author himself will have experienced lots of difficulties. She hasn’t worked outside the home in twenty-five years, has neither savings nor higher education and cannot look to extended family to support her, her two daughters pursuing University, or the two boys still at home. A novel of mourning, healing and awakening; its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject. Award-winning Irish author's eighth novel, set in Wexford, the story of a woman "widowed in her forties with four children and not enough money" but who nevertheless manages to find solace and encouragement.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, the books about losing her husband and her daughter, and Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name, his book about the death of his wife, use with skill and subtlety the very gift for narrative which distinguishes the authors as novelists. Tóibín has thought a lot about the role of aunts in the literature he loves, and he is famously good at female characters. After nine books of fiction and a plethora of stimulating and often personal essays on reading and writing, we know that everything in Tóibín has a lineage in his own accessible brand of literary scholarship.

His stammer, which never goes away, articulates his grief and potentially reflects society’s ruptures. With Nora Webster, he has gone ‘out to the hazel wood’, as it were, to sing up this key source of his power and place it squarely onto the page.What is it about Josie that allows Nora to turn to her after she struggles with her pain and insomnia (p. Alone in the world, both James and Nora Webster attempted to find a way out of failure or grief or loss. For one, the major event of the novel – the death of Nora’s husband Maurice – happens before it begins, precluding any easy cinematic tropes and allowing us, in a narrative simulation of ‘big bang’ cosmologies, to begin after the beginning, as it were. When Nora meets with William and Peggy Gibney to discuss working for them, she thinks of how Peggy and Francie Kavanaugh’s lives have changed since Nora first worked at Gibney’s.