New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Tóibín
William Leith15 March 2013
These are essays by Colm Tóibín, an Irish novelist of the highest calibre. He is a subtle and clever thinker. Here, he tells us about other writers and their families — the ones they came from, and the ones they created. He is excellent on the lack of mothers in 18th- and 19th-century novels. There are plenty of aunts. But the novel is all about the personal growth of the individual, so mothers would get in the way. He is perceptive about Henry James and Jane Austen. There’s some lovely work on JM Synge, WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett. And a superb piece on John Cheever, which explores Cheever’s writing through the lens of his difficult marriage, his secret gay trysts, and his alcoholism.
