A review by nickartrip102
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín

3.0

“We walk among them sometimes, the ones who have left us. They are filled with something that none of us knows yet. It is a mystery.”

I’ve been in a one-sided beef with Colm Tóibín since I read Long Island, but when I saw Nora Webster sitting on the shelf at my public library, I couldn’t resist checking it out. I had, after all, really enjoyed his writing and storytelling in Brooklyn and the cover matter really grabbed my attention. Nora Webster becomes a widow at age 40 when her husband, Maurice, dies from cancer. Without enough money, she finds herself pushed back into the workforce under the thumb of the miserly Miss Kavanagh. Consumed by the shadows of her own grief, she struggles to connect with her children through their own loss, while suffocating under the weight of sympathy from her family and neighbors.

Tóibín’s introduction to Nora is immediately characterized by the change in status she has undergone, from wife to widow and he effortlessly paints her as a woman, not only in the depths of grief, but also caught in an identity crisis: “He was using a new tone with her, a tone he would never nave tried before. He was speaking to as though he had some authority over her” “Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions. She had tried since the funeral to ignore this tone, or tolerate it. She had tried to understand it was shorthand for kindness.” These really quite simple lines really set the tone for how I felt about Nora as a character. I’ve known grief and loss, but not of this variety or under the same context, yet I really felt a connection to Nora.

How do we offer up parts of ourselves, collected from the rubble of already fractured souls? And how much more difficult must that be for a woman, a mother? Nora is often treated as a child, but also judged for her failures in trying to balance new, or renewed, responsibilities, a new role as the sole parent of her children, her “neglect” of them as she stayed by Maurice’s side during his illness. She has to manage the fall out of every decision, whether that be one’s made for her (like the new job, or being kept in the dark about Una’s engagement), or the rare decision made for herself. Tóibín explores grief, the feeling of being displaced, that distance that can never quite be bridged between two people, the way our lives fall apart and we wage invisible, unknowable wars as life carries on in front of us. Nora Webster is a quiet novel not much happens, but it is also very moving.