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A review by siria
The Empty Family: Stories by Colm Tóibín
3.0
As is often the case with a collection of short stories, I really enjoyed some of The Empty Family and others I didn't. Tóibín is at his best with the stories that are calm and reflective, almost like extracts from a longer novel, and he has a particular knack for capturing the rhythms of Irish speech—reading his dialogue is like hearing echoes from home. His prose can occasionally be a little purple and self-indulgent—'One Minus One' begins "The moon hangs low over Texas. The moon is my mother", which was almost enough to have me flicking on to the next story. I'm glad I stuck with it, though, because that story, about an émigré author racing back to Ireland from the States to be with his mother before she died, was beautifully observed and so unsettlingly close to some aspects of my grandmother's recent passing and my relationship with her that it had me in tears.
Other stories were too opaque for me, or seemed to rely too much on the Shock Value of two men having oral or anal sex. I'm not sure how much that's still the case in 21st century Ireland, outside of your average member of Youth Defence or so on, and they're unlikely to be picking up a book by an openly gay author in the first place, and when you strip away the Shock Value, then you have some rather dull Tab A into Slot B sex. Which may, in a way, have been Tóibín's point—gay people can have boring sex too!—but if I've read hotter stuff that managed to convey better characterisation than happens here.
Other stories were too opaque for me, or seemed to rely too much on the Shock Value of two men having oral or anal sex. I'm not sure how much that's still the case in 21st century Ireland, outside of your average member of Youth Defence or so on, and they're unlikely to be picking up a book by an openly gay author in the first place, and when you strip away the Shock Value, then you have some rather dull Tab A into Slot B sex. Which may, in a way, have been Tóibín's point—gay people can have boring sex too!—but if I've read hotter stuff that managed to convey better characterisation than happens here.