Colm Tóibín has a new book out this Thursday, New Ways to Kill Your Mother — a collection of essays examining how writers and their families relate to each other. Tóibín introduced the essays in Saturday’s Guardian, and was interviewed by the Times’ Erica Wagner (£):
‘As with his memoir, in which what is left out is as vital as what is put in, these essays are remarkable for looking at the personal, familial relationships of writers while always, somehow, allowing them the freedom to be artists. Tóibín will not discuss his personal life. When I remark that he has always resisted dealing with homosexuality in his work, he says quickly:
“I’m resisting it again now. It was why I was interested in [Henry] James: the level of ambiguity, the uncertainty. I’m friends in New York with Edmund White, in London I’m friends with Alan Hollinghurst and obviously we have a lot in common. We’re gay and we’re novelists. It’s nice to see them and I find what they do fascinating but I come from a different place. It would be nice to be able to write like they do. I really envy that — to have a sort of theme that I could then keep working different ways around but I just can’t see it.”’
Tóibín’s book is not the slimmest, weighing in at 332 pages. There is a trend for long books, said Robert McCrum in the Observer. Whatever happened, he wondered, to the short novel mastered by Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Nevil Shute et al? Certainly, the fiction that has arrived on my desk this morning could pass for doorstops. A collection of short stories: 292 pages. The latest by a popular thriller writer: 410 pages. A first novel with an unpromising cover: 372 pages.
Tóibín, though, is prepared to buck the trend. His next book, The Testament of the Virgin Mary, will be around 30,000 words long, which is about one hundred pages. That’s still rather longer than the Gospels themselves, which are concision itself. St. Matthew, for instance, needed just 157 words (in Greek) to recount the feeding of the 5,000. How many will Tóibín use?
Sex and politics are back in vogue in America. Former White House intern Mimi Alford has broken a 50 year silence. The Sunday Times’ Lynn Barber summarises (£) Alford’s memoir thus:
‘Mimi Alford was 19, and had only once been kissed by a boy, when President Kennedy deflowered her in the summer of 1962… Most kiss-and-tell stories make you feel a bit grubby for reading them, but this one doesn’t. It is a likeable book by a likeable woman, who seems entirely trustworthy.’
Will you be as convinced? The account of Alford and Kennedy’s first encounter tests one’s creduility a little. On discovering that Alford was a virgin, the president is reputed to have asked ‘Are you alright?’, before ploughing on regardless. It’s a scene worthy of the baleful The Kennedys TV-series.
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