Fans of Colm Tóibín will little doubt be pleased on the news that he has a recent book of essays coming out. A Guest on the Feast can be released next month, and guarantees to supply the Irish wordsmith’s reflections on among the same themes and topics which have made him certainly one of the preeminent authors within the English-speaking world. Americans might best know him from his novel Brooklyn, but for 32 years he has been steadily publishing fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays.
Born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in Ireland (from which several of his fictional protagonists hail) in 1955, Tóibín moved to Barcelona in 1975 after graduating from University College Dublin. He lived in Spain until 1978, returning to Dublin and dealing as a author and editor. His first novel, The South, was published in 1990.
In 2013, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., proposed Tóibín’s Mary as a great example of how the early Christians developed and defined their faith in an interreligious world.
He has published 10 novels and two short story collections and has authored or edited greater than 20 non-fiction volumes. A variety of his novels have won or been finalists for outstanding literary awards, particularly 1999’s The Blackwater Lightship, 2004’s The Master, 2009’s Brooklyn (which was a Catholic Book Club selection in 2009; the film adaptation was reviewed in America by Michael V. Tueth, S.J., in 2016) and his controversial 2012 The Testament of Mary. His latest novel, 2021’s The Magician, was a portrait of the author Thomas Mann and his family (America readers may enjoy this recent article by Franklin Freeman, revisiting Mann’s life and work).
A Guest on the Feast—a group of previously published essays—guarantees Tóibín’s sharp takes on plenty of topics and themes he has embraced before in each fiction and non, including the connection between parents and youngsters, how writers develop their themes in youth, the experience of growing up and living as a gay man in Ireland, his own 2018 bout with cancer (with a memorable first line to not be repeated here), the love/hate relationship the Irish have with the Catholic Church, what it’s wish to be an exile and more.
Tóibín’s fictional characters will be dark—in his 2006 short story collection, Moms and Sons, the protagonist believes “that behind every little thing lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that an individual was merely a disguise for one more person, that something said was merely a code for something else”—but they’re at all times fastidiously detailed and multifaceted. The protagonist of Brooklyn, Ellis Lacy, is an easy woman from Enniscorthy after we first meet her; by the top of the novel she is one of the vital psychologically complex and nuanced characters in recent literature.
“As an artist, Tóibín is a conventional storyteller, so sure a stylist that he pares his words to the minimum, so confident a plot-master that he can end a story without resolving the plot yet leave a reader fully satisfied,” wrote former America literary editor Joseph J. Feeney, S.J., in a 2012 review of Moms and Sons.
Tóibín’s works have been reviewed again and again in America, however it was his 2012 novella The Testament of Mary that compelled quite a few America commentators to weigh in. The narrator of the book is Mary the mother of Jesus, speaking long after Good Friday, and he or she guides the reader through her life with Jesus in addition to her own existence as an aging woman in Ephesus surrounded by disciples of Jesus, whom she describes as “my protectors, or my guards, or whatever it is that they are.”
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell: “The inventions of tradition and bad art have provided us with too many inconceivable Marys who bear no relation to us. Do we want one other?”
This isn’t any silent and passive Mary, but a mother with complex feelings toward her son and his followers. She is by turns offended, bitter, resigned or unsure of her own recollections and convictions. Jesus’ friends, wrote Diane Scharper in a 2012 review in America, “need to invent a recent religion that may establish her son as divine. But Mary won’t accept that.”
As an alternative, “Mary spends most of her time wondering whether she ever knew her son. When he was little, they were close, but then he fell in with a crowd of misfits. He became emotionally distant. She heard rumors that he healed a cripple and walked on water, but she will be able to’t consider that such actions may very well be performed by the boy she raised,” Scharper wrote.
In a 2013 review of a play based on Tóibín’s novella, frequent America contributor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell praised Tóibín for “attempting to deconstruct the photographs of the passive, bloodless Mary that dominated pietistic art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” but additionally confessed that “much as I like his writing, I couldn’t countenance his Mary.” What troubled O’Donnell? “After her son is nailed to the cross—a scene described in agonizing detail—Mary runs away. She runs away because she cannot help him, because she is afraid and (here is the toughest part to swallow) because she wants to avoid wasting her own skin,” she wrote.
Tóibín’s fictional characters will be dark, but they’re at all times fastidiously detailed and multifaceted.
No mother would run away while her son was being tortured and murdered, she argued—making Tóibín’s depiction of Mary as difficult to consider as any pious rendering in art: “The inventions of tradition and bad art have provided us with too many inconceivable Marys who bear no relation to us,” she continued. “Do we want one other? Tóibín denies Mary what makes her most human, sinning finally against the law of verisimilitude, and giving us another Mary we cannot consider in.”
Also in 2013, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., proposed Tóibín’s Mary as a great example of how the early Christians developed and defined their faith in an interreligious world. In any case, Tóibín depicts Mary as visiting the temple of Artemis in Ephesus and talking with the Greek goddess. “Tóibín is unlikely to win any awards from the Church, or find his book on the market within the Vatican bookshop. He’s, to be certain, not a Catholic theologian,” Clooney wrote. “But in the entire of the book, and in these transient moments where Artemis is mentioned, he perhaps catches something of an experience we want not entirely rule out in our own meditations on Mary.”
Why? Because even when “we for probably the most part accept the slow growth of Christian consciousness within the earliest Church, and even when we recognize, in theory not less than, the way it took a protracted time for the Gospels to be composed and finalized, perhaps we still are too confident about what this early period will need to have been like for those closest to Jesus, those that loved him most,” Clooney continued.
“So Mary is now the patron of interreligious humility and learning? Perhaps an excessive amount of of a claim to make,” Clooney wrote. “But read The Testament and see what you consider Mary there, at first, and Cana, and Artemis, when the mystery of Jesus was still stark and raw, and the Church had not yet found its language about its boundaries. A minimum of imagine the probabilities before saying no.”
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.: “Tóibín is unlikely to win any awards from the Church,” but “he perhaps catches something of an experience we want not entirely rule out in our own meditations on Mary.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Christmas Spectacular,” by America poetry editor Joseph Hoover, S.J. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
On this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular author or group of writers (each recent and old; our archives span greater than a century), in addition to poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this may give us a likelihood to supply you more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to a few of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
Theophilus Lewis brought the Harlem Renaissance to the pages of America
William Lynch, the best American Jesuit you’ve probably never heard of
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Leonard Feeney, America’s only excommunicated literary editor (to this point)
Joan Didion: A chronicler of recent life’s horrors and consolations
Blissful reading!
James T. Keane
