When I first started reading Colm Toibin’s latest collection of short stories, The Empty Family, I have to admit that I didn’t rub along with it too well. I have a habit, you see – and I’m willing to admit it’s a bad habit – when I come to reading short story collections and that bad habit is to read stories out of sequence. If I’m on the bus, say, and I have 15 minutes to my stop, I won’t start the next story if I think I won’t finish it – I’ll find a story that I think I can read in 15 minutes or so. It’s what I think of, sometimes, as a pragmatic approach to reading short story collections but, even as I do it, I feel like I’m performing a disservice to the writer (because after all he or she chose to put the stories in a particular order for a particular reason).
So, I began reading Colm Toibin’s The Empty Family at story 3 (‘The Empty Family’) before skipping back to read the first two stories (‘One Minus One’ and ‘Silent’), skipping ahead to read ‘Barcelona 1975’ and then back to read ‘Two Women’, ‘The Pearl Fishers’ and ‘The New Spain’ before finishing up, as intended, with the last and longest story in the book, ‘The Street’). The experience was a strange and not always satisfying one. Like the cover of the book (that shows a woman and a child dressed for winter walking together along a shingled beach), the tide of my interest frequently came in and went out. Take ‘The Empty Family’ as a for instance. The story opens:
‘I have come back here. I can look out and see the soft sky and the faint line of the horizon and the way the light changes over the sea. It is threatening rain. I can sit on this old high chair that I had shipped from a junk store on Market Street and watch the calmness of the sea against the misting sky.’
It is perfectly pleasant, don’t get me wrong – but am I alone in seeing Colm Toibin sitting at a chair casting around for a story? The story itself which circles around and back on itself somewhat solipstically concerns a man who has returned having been away, addressing someone from his past, a lover perhaps, as he ruminates on where he is and what he has done and what he is doing (meeting relatives of the person in question, buying a telescope). It is a story that feels (irrespective of whether it is or it isn’t) like an intimate poem, a glimpse into the writer’s life – and, as such, it doesn’t stand on two legs as a short story should.
Similarly, ‘One Minus One’ (which I think I read first in the Guardian a year or so ago) which opens in full on literary portentous style like so:
‘The moon hangs low over Texas. The moon is my mother. She is full tonight and brighter than the brightest moon; there are folds of red in her vast amber. Maybe she is a harvest moon, a Comanche moon, I do not know. I have never seen a moon so low and so full of her own deep brightness. My mother is six years dead tonight, and Ireland is six hours away and you are asleep.’
‘One Minus One’ concerns a man (like Colm Toibin) who teaches in America, trying to settle to a life but finding it hard only to be called back to Ireland for his mother’s final few hours (again, a person returns somewhere, having been away, dealing with people who have remained behind, who view him askance for having a peripatetic spirit). Fast forward to ‘The Pearl Fishers’, a story in which an author meets two people he was friendly with at school, both of whom are now married, one of whom the author had an affair with – again there are echoes of a mother who passed away the previous summer. The same whiff of ‘here is life as lived’ appears in ‘Barcelona 1975’, a febrile memoir-y glimpse into a young man’s precocious homosexual awakening in a Spain rife with political upheaval. Obviously a writer has ideas for stories. Obviously certain situations suggest themselves as good fertile subjects. But again and again in The Empty Family, there is the sense of Toibin offering you a relatively unfiltered glimpse into his life. It might just be me but I want more from a short story than ‘Here is something that happened to me that I have written down’. Short stories are, after all, stories and stories should be things that are made up. This isn’t sold as a collection of short memoirs or short reflections or ‘short things that I wanted to tell you about my life’.
Thankfully there are stories in The Empty Family that actually feel like stories. ‘Silence’, for example, which is obviously an offshoot of Toibin’s work on The Master, inspired as it is by a note Henry James made in a notebook about a woman who was ruined on her wedding day thanks to a letter her new husband found from an earlier lover. ‘Silence’ trades up on the note, having the woman in question, a Lady Gregory, married to an old distracted MP and engaging in an affair with a poet – a climactic dinner engagement at which she is sat next to Henry James sees her try to immortalise her experience, downplaying the intensity of the affair and which
‘gave her a strange sense of satisfaction that she had lodged her secret with him, a secret over-wrapped perhaps, but at least the rudiments of its shape apparent, if not to him then to her, for whom these matters were pressing, urgent and gave meaning to her life.’
‘Two Women’ also sees a person returning to Ireland after time away but thankfully the characterisarion of the person in question – a creative art director in films called Frances Rossiter – is so strong that you forgive the echo. Frances is getting on in yearsm is stubborn and can be, she knows, unlikeable but, as she gets to grips with working on a new film for a so-called visionary director, she worries over a scene and harks back in her mind to an affair sher had many years previous, an affair that will find closure of sorts in this, what she calls, her last ever trip to Ireland. ‘The New Spain’ also features a female narrator (Toibin is good, it seems, at writing from a female perspective), a young Spanish girl returning home after a few years away (see the recurring theme) only to embark on a furious battle with her parents over a house left to her by her grandmother. Again, the narrator, Carme Giralt, is not wholly likeable but the story is a good one, original and interesting, leading you by the nose to the point where, at the climax, you feel all but in the corner of this spoilt and charismatic rich girl.
The longest story in the book, ‘The Street’, clocks in at just over 60 pages and feels like a radical departure for Toibin (even though we are in familar territory per se given that the story primarily concerns a sort of on again off again love affair between two men): Malik is a Pakistani man brought to work in Spain in one of those black market deals where poor immigrants are forced to work illegally to pay off their flights and living expenses. He works (badly, subject to mockery) in a barber’s shop and shares a room with four other men, one of whom, Abdul, he becomes close to, even though Abdul rarely speaks or gives anything of himself. Following an impromptu get-together after light’s out in the barber’s shop that sees them badly beaten by their boss, an emotional man called Baldy, Malik is taken first to a hospital and then to a top floor room apart from everyone he has grown to know where he recuperates from broken ribs and battered bones, an arm and a leg in plaster. Super – who appears to run ‘the street’ on which all of this goes on – arranges for Abdul to move into the room but even then there are complications, Abdul’s cousin quickly following to take up a mattress on the floor. The story feels modern and current and Toibin manages to craft a sustained world in which characters live and breathe and the situation is universal enough to leave you, as the story arrives at its relatively happy conclusion, to satisfy you. Job well done, you think.
Any Cop?: All told, there are enough stories in The Empty Family that tick the box marked ‘good short story’ to warrant purchase. Certainly there is a sense that Toibin needs to turn down the knob marked ‘solipsism’ and ask himself ‘what would William Trevor do?’ a little more often, but all things considered this is a pretty good collection.
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