Tóibín Reveals Private Passions in ‘The Empty Family’

On September 18, 1983, the Andalusian painter José Pérez Ocaña slipped on a wig and a sun costume he had made for himself of paper, cloth, and flares, closed the door of his flat in Barcelona, and walked down the stairs to join his friends. Ocaña had sensitive features and big dark eyes, which he sometimes liked to line in kohl; he had dressed in flamboyant outfits like this one many times before. This time, however, the flares somehow made contact with the paper, and the costume caught fire. The burns were fatal; Ocaña died in hospital one week later.

Ocaña is alluded to briefly in “Barcelona, 1975,” one of nine stories in Colm Tóibín’s new collection “The Empty Family,” as the unnamed subject of a Ventura Pons film playing in the Cine Malda. His outwardly expressive presence becomes an invisible counterpoint to all of Tóibín’s more passive protagonists—individuals who, unlike Ocaña, are either unable or uniwlling to display themselves so openly and wish for lives that are totally private. Because society transforms their desires into transgressions, however, a cozy private life is impossible, and so they retreat into their own inner worlds.

An Irish writer best known for his novels “The Blackwater Lightship,” “The Master,” and “Brooklyn,” Tóibín knows how to turn a lovely sentence, full of cadence and lyricism. In this collection, Ireland makes up the backdrop: many of his characters are returning to Ireland after a long absence, or are still—though expatriates—carrying the land within them. Occasionally, his impressionistic parlor language becomes delicate to the point of self-indulgence, as in the title story or the multiple stories about dying older relatives. For the most part, though, these are truly radiant selections, exercises in the pleasures of slowness.

Tóibín openly draws inspiration from the dense, introspective works of the late Henry James. Various characters read James’ novels, and in the opener “Silence,” one Lady Gregory, of whom James makes passing note in his diaries, recounts her adulterous affair. Like James, Tóibín carefully puts each word in its place; his elegiac sentences can barely contain his characters’ mad desires. But the analogy ends with style, not any larger literary architecture. James, in his preface to “The Wings of the Dove,” lays out his ideal for the novel: blocks of plot with various ‘centres’ finely drawn, along with structural clues—’secrets and compartments, with possible treacheries and traps’—planted along the way so the parts might fit seamlessly together. Tóibín’s plots do not aim for this careful self-contained craftsmanship, just as his characters lack any self-conscious craftsmanship of their own lives.

Instead of interlocking narratives, Tóibín tells the same story again and again, in different environments and with different characters: an intense private life, with the outside world beyond knowledge or control. At times, characters are responsible for fencing themselves off: ‘the rest is science and I do not do science.’ Politics are largely a matter of indifference: a young woman’s leftist leanings as a university student in England are meaningful largely due to the estrangement she feels from her Spanish family when she returns home. In the years following the fall of General Francisco Franco, who dictated Spain from 1936 to 1975, Tóibín’s characters are not building a new government but staging private orgies. As a student writes: ‘Now and then over those months, a crucial time in the history of Spain, I noticed how generally indifferent people were to anything except the private realm, which was inhabited by the young with great intensity. The books you read, the friends you met, the lovers you slept with, the music you listened to, the new identities you took on, these were the things that mattered in that autumn in Barcelona.’

One illicit private passion that Tóibín addresses in the novel is gay sex. There is the passage of despairing, frantic tenderness between two schoolboys in “The Pearl Fishers,” one of many bleak, erotically charged scenes: “I wondered if he would avoid me… if he would try to make me forget that I had fed his sweet, thick, pungent, lemony sperm into my mouth with my fingers as if it were jam, desperately trying to make sure that none was wasted.” In the lovely final story, “The Street,” Tóibín picks up the familiar narrative of Pakistani immigrants finding their identity but adds a twist—this is not London but Barcelona, and his characters are gay. Abdul and Malik fall in love while working together selling mobile phones; when their boss catches them in a closet at the shop, he beats them. The real struggle comes in the weeks following, when the two must learn how to live with one another.

Although in these stories private urges are often overwhelming, when one party loses interest or desire, the other is always willing to let him drift away. Tóibín’s narrators are unflinching in their accounts of love lost. Lives collide and come apart with ease and without reason; endless possibility exists only because it is so absolutely untrimmed by expectation. ‘I walked down the stairs of that flat in the Plaza Real for the last time and into the shining city,’ a character writes. ‘I was ready, once more, for anything.’ Crossing a Dublin bridge in what is perhaps the most lovely passage in the book, the narrator reflects that: ‘no matter how grim the city I walked through was, how cavernous my attic rooms, how long and solitary the night to come, I would not exchange any of it for the easy rituals of mutuality and closeness that Grainne and Donnacha were performing now. I checked my pocket to make sure I had the keys with me and almost smiled to myself at the bare thought that I had not forgotten them.’

Perhaps this Irish grimness is why Spain, where Tóibín moved following university, takes on a quasi-mythical status in his writing. To Tóibín, Spain is Ireland’s inverse, a conflagration of intense living, in which the public and the private merge in drug-hazed carnivals and fascism, art and free love. The Ireland of his books is quiet, Catholic, gray; it mourns. And yet Tóibín treats it tenderly, for it is the place where the ordinary happens. People work, write, and die slow, natural deaths. ‘Life, that was the material that he used and needed. There could never be enough life,’ he writes. ‘But it was only the beginning, of course, because life was thin.’ Living out fragments of stories with no narrative or nostalgia, Tóibín’s characters possess nothing more than “bare thoughts.” It is only after the fact, sitting alone in their rooms remembering, that these thoughts assume the mantle of truth.

—Staff writer Jessica A. Sequeira can be reached at jsequeir@fas.harvard.edu.