BOOK REVIEW: Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín became one of my favorite writers after I read The Magician, and I loved The Master as well. I came across Nora Webster in a used bookstore and bought it quite a while ago, but just now got around to reading it. It’s going to be our next book group book.

Set in Ireland in the late sixties, Nora Webster follows the life of a woman who has just lost her husband, Maurice, far too young. (They are in their late 40s.) She has two grown daughters and two younger sons (a teenager and an elementary-school aged boy.) The girls have moved out. The boys are at home.

Nora is a very private and prickly woman. She is distant from her extended family, even her children, and feels closest to her brother-in-law and his wife. She lives in a small, close-knit community where her husband, a school teacher, had been well-loved. Nora wants mostly to be left alone. Very gradually, she emerges from the cocoon of her grief and starts to make a new life for herself.

It’s a quiet book, but compelling because Tóibín climbs inside Nora’s head and makes us feel her deep, unexpressed emotion. At times, the reader may cringe at her inability to connect with people, but then it seems she has been connecting with them, in her own way, all along. The prose is straightforward, evoking the somewhat tunneled, nothing-extraneous life that Nora has lived.

Ireland, at the time, is involved in great political upheavals. These are acknowledged as events on T.V., or protests that one of the daughters is involved with, or the unionization of the business where Nora works. But these events only touch Nora peripherally. Or, she is interested in them only as they touch her world specifically. But it provides a larger context for the reader.

Tóibín’s writing is so wonderful that he can give us a story about an unknown Irish widow and make her life every bit as compelling as those of Thomas Mann and Henry James.