Where Love and Grief Collide

MOTHERS AND SONS

By Colm Tóibín

Scribner. 271 pp. $24

Being Irish, the writer Colm Tóibín must forever defend himself against accusations of an inborn, uncontrollable sentimentalism. He certainly hasn't made his struggle any easier by writing a collection of short stories all about the relationship between mothers and their sons -- in the wrong hands, a recipe for mawkishness that can end only with the pipes calling Danny boy from glen to glen while his beloved Ma waits patiently for him in sunshine or in shadow.

But Tóibín -- whose previous novel The Master won acclaim for its nuanced depiction of Henry James -- isn't that kind of writer. Though he's not above gently tugging at heartstrings, he seems more interested in mapping the silent, awkward distance between his characters than in celebrating any sort of mystical connection. Like moons, the sons in this collection are caught in the powerful orbits of the women who birthed them; they spin and shine with what looks like self-determination, but they know they can never travel too far without being pulled back in.

The desperate mother in "The Name of the Game," one of the strongest stories here, puts everything she has into rebuilding her life after the sudden death of her husband, who has left her with three children and a failing business. Using her last pennies, she converts her moribund grocery store into a fish-and-chips shop and dreams of making enough money to escape her tiny village and start again in the anonymous suburbs of Dublin. Gerard, her adolescent son, doesn't want to leave -- he's at the age when his obligation to obey his mother's directives is just about to be replaced by his right to do as he pleases. The tantalizing nearness of adult autonomy brings tears to his eyes; he can see the life he has imagined for himself right there in front of him, but his mother stands in the way.

In "The Use of Reason," a hardened Dublin gangster must work his way around a different kind of obstacle: his alcoholic mother's penchant for bragging to anyone who'll listen about her boy's toughness and loyalty, not to mention his cleverness at evading the authorities. But that same fiercely prideful love comes as a comfort to the disgraced son in "A Priest in the Family." Facing charges of clerical sexual abuse, he encourages his elderly mother to take a long vacation, away from the sordid headlines and scandalous details. Her simple, reflexive refusal to leave her son in his moment of despair and ignominy is the most poignant moment in a book filled with many.

Ending Mothers and Sons is "A Long Winter," which, uniquely among these stories, takes place in Catalonia rather than in Ireland. As a young man searches for his missing mother -- she has walked into the snowy mountains after an argument with his father -- he slowly girds himself for the near certainty of her death. In his sadness and confusion, he takes comfort in the arms of the houseboy his father has hired to perform those chores the mother once handled. Freudian critics will be parsing this one for years to come, but Tóibín isn't trying to be perverse. Strange fires burn where love and grief collide. Here, as in all the wise, tender and illuminating stories to be found in this collection, he aims simply to show how, for better or for worse, the bond between mother and son is as inexplicable as it is unbreakable.

--Jeff Turrentine, a critic whose work has appeared in Book World, the New York Times and Slate.