Colm Tóibín's The Empty Family [[Kindle]] ranks with a handful of books (by Alice Munro, William Trevor, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tatyana Tolstaya, Mavis Gallant, Julie Hecht, Annie Proulx, and Raymond Carver) as one of the great story collections of the past quarter century. His stories are larger and recent high praise is insufficient for the power they achieve.
Often, the stories easily inhabit three settings. Always, the present moment is balanced by the weight of the past. A trio of themes -- loss, solitude, dislocation -- yield infinite brilliance. In a mere fifteen pages “One Minus One” covers Texas, New York, and Dublin; the narrator’s failed relationship with the man he’s addressing; and a lifetime of family strain resurfacing as his mother dies. My favorite, “Two Women,” conveys Dublin, Los Angeles, and Guatemala as a wonderfully brusque set dresser Frances Rossiter reluctantly returns to her native Ireland to work on a movie.
“The lowness of the buildings in Dublin, shops that were cheap imitations of larger and better shops in bigger cities, ways of dressing that were either shabby or pretentious, and ways of moving in the street that lacked alertness or any style, all began to irritate her. At the weekend, especially on Fridays, the hotel lobby and the bars filled up with drinkers, and once or twice, having pushed her way through a crowd of half-drunken men and women, she was proud of having lived most of her life away from such people and glad that the staff of the hotel, unfailingly polite and self-effacing, came from elsewhere.
It struck her that she really would not come back, that she would work in future anywhere but here. Even Gabi’s efficiency and sweetness seemed complacent to her, and some of the men moving sets were too slow, almost openly lazy. She found it difficult, especially in the third and fourth weeks of filming, not to show her impatience. She loved intelligent, decisive people who did things briskly, and on a few occasions when she had to phone home and found herself speaking down the line to Rosario, she realized how much she missed Rosario’s intelligence, almost exquisite at times in its depth of perception, and her way of moving, so elegant and careful and poised.”
The nature of artifice is Frances’s life’s work – notice how she views even the real Dublin shops as “imitations” – and one sees how she's become its master:
“The director used to be young – she smiled at the thought as she opened the set drawings she had carried with her – but now he was no longer young. But he was not old enough to know that you got nothing extra from using a real pub, no matter how quaint and full of atmosphere, instead of a studio-built pub. A set, she knew, just needed a few spare props that suggested something; with a real pub, you would have to spend hours removing objects that suggested too much, and painting over colours that seemed faded to the eye but would jar once bright lights and a camera were shone on them.”
The story’s interest in the art of artifice expands, incorporating paintings at the National Gallery and how a movement by a guard there recalls the dead Irish actor (artifice personified) with whom she had a very long affair, the core romance of her life. Ultimately, a chance encounter on set in the burdensome pub penetrates Frances’s own carefully constructed facade, right down to her speech, which reverts to the softer, Irish cadences of her youth.
All the other stories are equally engaging, and their meticulous subtleties and intricate craft arrive almost hidden by compelling characers and compulsive plots. “The New Spain” unspools layers of ironies as Carme, a former radical communist who frittered away years of exile in London, returns to Barcelona then Menorca with drastically different standing in her uptight family now that she’s inherited half of her grandmother’s property. The novella “The Street” explores the loving, neutral, or brutal hierarchies among Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona, where one character is wholly dependent physically and financially on his attacker.
Gay relationships are the core concern of five or six of the stories. Francine Prose considers the best in the collection to be “The Pearl Fishers” about a gay man’s meal with a bourgeois couple, reuniting him with his first lover from boarding school and that man’s wife who is gaining fame as a crusader against past abuse. Readers of Brooklyn’s detailed hetero sex scenes who thought Tóibín would never be so explicit with his gay characters will especially appreciate those teenage flashbacks as well as the many male couplings and orgy in “Barcelona, 1975.” Returning to more oblique times, the first story, “Silence,” sees the author of The Master
again imagine Henry James as a character, now through the eyes of his widowed dinner partner, who carefully recasts her passionate adultery as a story idea for him. Again the source of art and the urge to remake the past propel this collection to astonishing heights.