Small Matters

The new story collection from Colm Tóibín, a late-career Irish writer whose first novel was published in 1990, offers insight into the author’s current preoccupations and perhaps a glimpse of what’s to come. As The News from Dublin makes clear, Tóibín is grappling with death — how it’s experienced, how it’s grieved, and what it means.

In “Barton Springs,” a man in the autumn of life recalls an earlier period when he lived in Austin and regularly went swimming after sundown. He wonders if those sensations prefigure his departure from this realm. “If someone had told me on one of those nights that this is what it will be like when death comes for us, I would have understood,” Tóibín writes. “There will be water, and there will be distant sounds, and people will fade into shadows one by one as the time comes.”

Tóibín depicts grief as Dickinson does happiness, sideways, an emotion that’s partitioned by competing thoughts. In the opening story, “The Journey to Galway,” a mother must deliver the news of her son’s death in World War II to his young widow, a scene whose pathos has been pre-diluted by his infidelity with his wife’s best friend. The mother thinks the son’s death will whitewash his “cruel and thoughtless” conduct. “His dying meant that she would no longer have to judge him,” the mother thinks. In “Sleep,” an Irishman living in New York scares away his lover with terrifying nightmares that are accompanied by screams and thrashing. Only after undergoing hypnosis does he realize that his night terrors are caused by suppressed grief.

Tóibín’s characters find themselves helpless in the face of larger forces. The title story, which takes place in Ireland during a tuberculosis outbreak, involves a man’s quest to procure a rumored miracle drug that could save his dying brother. Maurice Webster, husband to Nora (the eponymous heroine of a previous Tóibín novel), trades on his father’s heroics in the Irish rebellion in hopes of receiving preferential treatment. The “news” he receives is humbling: In an epidemic, no single life is valuable. Maurice doesn’t pray because he “was not sure, despite what others believed, that God interfered in small matters.”

These stories are more concerned with the effects of tragedies than the cataclysms themselves. In “Five Bridges” (one of several that first appeared in The New Yorker), a man facing deportation to Ireland after living for decades as an undocumented worker in the Bay Area muses on his habit, in lieu of a bank account, of hiding rolls of cash in socks strewn about his apartment. “No one would ever guess why he had left behind so many pairs of socks that looked as though they had never been worn,” he says. In some cases, the calamity comes early, leaving characters to rebuild their lives over decades. In “Summer of ’38,” a Spanish woman rejects the chance to meet an old lover after 50 years. As passionate and pivotal as their affair had been, she’s a different person now.

The jewel of this collection, “The Catalan Girls,” also spans decades and tracks the lives of mid-century Spaniards, here a widow and her three daughters who immigrate to Argentina to seek a new beginning. At 108 pages, it’s a novella in length with a novel’s worth of rivalry and duplicity. The eldest daughter, Núria, parlays charm and beauty into a Cinderella-like marriage to a wealthy man in Buenos Aires, but she plays the evil stepsister to her biological siblings. The youngest, Montse, endures 50 years of mistreatment before employing subterfuge to turn the tables on her oppressor. “The Catalan Girls” reminds readers that Tóibín, for all of his interest in issues of sexuality, art, religion, and history, is primarily a storyteller who knows how to reward our attention.

Tóibín, who has lived in Ireland, Europe, and the U.S., writes perceptively on the fates of exiles abroad and on the exile’s return (a theme he develops with Ellis Lacey in Brooklyn and Long Island). In “A Free Man,” an Irish teacher who has spent 10 years in prison for abusing students flees to Barcelona to attempt to piece together a fraction of a home. The “Five Bridges” protagonist Paul plans to return to the same childhood bedroom in Dublin he escaped as a young man. A fellow Irish-American warns him that his homecoming will be overwhelming. “Going home is a shell shock,” he says. “Get out of Dublin. The midlands would be a good place” — that is, to hide from Irish people.

Readers who have enjoyed Tóibín’s Ellis Lacey novels will relish this collection, but its most remarkable feature is the breaking of new narrative ground. These stories testify to their author’s continual re-invention. As much as Tóibín reaches back to make sense of the tumultuous past, his fiction charts new courses to the unknown future.