Through a glass, darkly

In The Master, a fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín constructed a convincing and ultimately moving account of a man who craved — albeit ambiguously — emotional distance. His life is shown as balancing between a yearning for and shrinking from personal intimacy; involving what can be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of the world, ostensibly at least for the sake of his art. In Mothers and Sons, Tóibín returns to the theme of the deep need for, and painful cost of, emotional withdrawal, this time concentrating upon the maternal bond.

All of the short stories in this collection are about separation, which is felt as both necessary and a form of betrayal. Obviously, it will take little ingenuity for critics to find other intertwined themes; and the stories are indeed about motherlands as well as mothers, and about the need for both belonging and escape in life and in art.

The sons in all these stories are teenagers or older, needing space for their own lives, particularly when these involve homosexual sex (which is in itself a betrayal of most mothers’ hopes). Several involve the separation of death, and the betrayal of the dead by the living: in one, a bereaved son goes to a drug-party on a beach; in another, the mother muses that her son does not know whether his doting grandmother’s death ‘was the lifting of a burden … or a loss he could not contemplate’.

Many of the stories involve the shock of a sudden discovery of distance. That moment when a mother suddenly sees her son as a grown-up stranger was supremely well caught by Alison Lurie in The War Between the Tates, where the mother for a moment does not recognise her son in a group of youths sniggering loutishly on a street-corner.