The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín

6 Feb 2012

The Empty Family
Colm Tóibín
Penguin Paperback, 215 pages,  ISBN 978-0-141-04177-3, £8.99

Alicia Rix

Colm Tóibín’s elegiac group of stories treats some autobiographical themes: being Irish, being gay, reading Henry James. Great novelists—including James himself—have been felled by the ‘terrible economy’ of the short story, though collections by the same author tend to be more generous, or perhaps more novelistic; allowing leitmotifs to develop and the stories to acquire an internal resonance.

Such is the case with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: musical and about music, or Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, in which disparate voices congregate around the brittle comedy of dysfunctional relationships and are marked by patterns of release, escape, flight.

Throughout Tóibín’s collection it is the titular word ‘empty’ and its synonyms that recur, as do backgrounds shorn of detail, particularly austere sea-scapes: ‘The horizon is whiteness, blankness; there are hardly any houses’, intones the narrator of the eponymous ‘The Empty Family’, a gently lyrical, occasionally morose commentary on the inability to go home again. Emptiness informs the names of the tales themselves: ‘One Minus One’, ‘The Colour of Shadows’, ‘Silence’. And it is a pregnant and cohesive emptiness.

Tóibín’s prose lacks the brilliant, punchy economy of a writer like Moore, but here the truncated quality of the stories feels deliberate, and the disjunctive switches between third and first-person narrators, between historical characters like the Irish playwright Lady Gregory and anonymous, meditative I-monologues, do not prevent our identification of the stories and their voices – at once detached and introspective – as members of the same ‘family’.

The familial itself is a persistent idea, underpinning the retrospective glances at love affairs, the sense of generational change accompanying the deaths of relatives, and the loneliness of travelling away from, or returning home. Tóibín’s characters experience solitude in groups: amongst crowds at concerts, restaurants, film sets, and orgies. Emptiness is a spectrum, the author suggests, and so its victims respond to it in different ways. The banished socialist daughter of ‘The New Spain’ returns to Barcelona after the Franco regime to find her family hostile and embarrassed and her hometown changed and tourist-ridden, and defiantly joins the crowd at a carnival. In ‘The Colour of Shadows’ the narrator’s aunt, his only guardian growing up, dies in an old people’s home after extracting a promise that he will never see his estranged mother.

Individual predicaments exhibit family resemblances, but there is little uniformity of tone. The easy, pleasure-seeking, yet ultimately ephemeral confidence of the narrator picking up men in ‘Barcelona, 1975’, contrasts with a stilted consciousness of surveillance in ‘The Street’, which traces the carefully developing intimacy between two Pakistani men in a ‘dark and frightening’ version of the city; whose employment selling mobile phones in the immigrant quarter gestures at an environment in which communication is heavily monitored. Likewise, the tacit suffering of Lady Gregory, who casually relates her affair to Henry James at a dinner party disguised as a tip of possible use for a story, (‘Silence’) seems very different from the urgent need to publish a secret relationship that we find in ‘The Pearl Fishers’, a bitchily funny recounting of clandestine encounters at a Catholic school. Over dinner with a couple of school friends, the narrator looks back to their adolescence, and to his covert relationship with Donnacha, the husband of the pair, now the blandly married adjunct of Gráinne, a sententious journalist. Gráinne has summoned him to let him know of her determination to expose a different ‘truth’: her seduction by a priest at the school. Her resolution to ‘tell the story of my life’, beginning with a single incident – a school trip to the opera –  overrides, but also intersects with, the narrator’s own private memoir.

In such ways, Tóibín’s stories question to what extent any story owes its origin, or bears ‘relation’ to, another. The series of exchanges by which Lady Gregory’s anecdotal ‘tip’ for the famous novelist is inscribed and later plucked from James’s notebooks to become a cue for Tóibín himself, deftly illustrates how one person’s life-story can touch, inform, or even hijack another’s. Tóibín’s Lady Gregory, who has a way of ‘let[ting] [people] know, carefully, tactfully, […] that she was someone on whom nothing was lost’, consciously recalls James’s advice to the ‘novice’ writer in ‘The Art of Fiction’: ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’ In the same essay James asks: ‘What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end?’, pointing out that  ‘[e]xperience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads.’ The Empty Family displays a nuanced understanding of such anxiety of relation.