Colm Tóibín gives us a deceptively simple but satisfying journey of growth in ‘Nora Webster’

Photo by Murdo Macleod

If you like loud, shoot-‘em-up books with lots of sex, violence and rock and roll, Colm Tóibín’s newest novel, Nora Webster, is not for you.

As Heller McAlpin wrote on NPR books,

Colm Tóibín’s writing is the literary equivalent of slow cuisine – and I mean that as a compliment. In this age of fast everything, sensational effects and unremitting violence, he uses only the purest literary ingredients – including minutely focused character development and a keen sense of place – and simmers his quietly dramatic narratives over a low burner.

Only forty-six years old, Nora Webster is coping – not very successfully – with the sudden death of her husband, Maurice, a beloved local teacher. She is left with two daughters away at school, two adolescent sons still at home, and very little money. Set in Enniscorthy, Ireland, Tóibín’s own home town, the book has autobiographical elements. It is, he has said, “the story he has been circling his whole career – the plainest telling of what happened to him and his family after his father died while he was still a boy.” (The Daily Beast, Books, 11/3/14).

Nora’s gradual path from grief to a kind of quiet contentment is inspired by that of the author’s own mother. Tóibín’s stand-in is Nora’s son,