On Colm Tóibín's new novel — "Didn't anyone notice that Nora's kind of a bitch?"

Colm Tóibín, an Irish writer whose work I admire, just published a new novel, Nora Webster.

Colm Tóibín, an Irish writer whose work I admire, just published a new novel, Nora Webster. Nora is a newly widowed mother of four who lives in a small town in County Wexford in Ireland, and who must come to terms with her new status. The reviews so far have been very positive.

(Speaking of reviews, as those of you who read this blog may have already noted, my goal is not to review books, but to write about the life of books, about how we respond to them, about the people who write them, and about literary culture in general.)

As I read through the Nora Webster reviews in preparation for teaching the book in my Hot Off the Press class, I noted that reviewers uniformly found the book to be a moving story of a widow finding her place in the world. The Washington Post says: ". . .the action of Nora Webster is composed of tender moments of quiet triumph and despair: the drama of a thoughtful family emerging from bereavement."

Novelist Tessa Hadley, writing in The Guardian, says: "I know that this novel is the real thing, rare and tremendous." It's true the book is excellent, and Tóibín's writing is masterful. But reading these comments, I thought to myself: "Didn't anyone notice that Nora's kind of a bitch?" (Actually one reviewer, Katherine A. Powers in The Chicago Tribune, did, calling Nora selfish.)

The people in my class noticed; quite a few of them really did not like her. Of course, there's nothing wrong with having an unlikeable character in a book (putting aside whether or not Tóibín intended her to be that).

Claire Messud is a novelist who took some flak recently for the personality of the main character of her latest novel, The Woman Upstairs. An interviewer asked Messud if she would want to be friends with the protagonist of her novel (also named Nora), whom the interviewer describes as "unbearably grim." Messud bristled at the question and, as reported in Slate, responded: "For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? . . . If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities."

Of course, it takes a writer of great skill to sustain a reader's interest in and sympathy with an unlikeable protagonist. And as readers, we can't avoid bringing our own emotional reactions to our reading. And while more traditional literary critics might claim the existence of pure meaning in any text, another school, called Reader Response criticism, believes that reader interaction with a book adds meaning. As Kevin Powers, a poet and author of the award-nominated novel The Yellow Birds told me recently, he believes any book he writes is not complete until it's in the hands of a reader.

Nora Webster's two youngest children are school-age boys who still live at home with her, and who happen to be roughly the same age as my two sons. Given this, I could not help but approach the book, at least partially, through the lens of mothering, comparing Nora's decisions as a mother to those I think I might have made in the same situation. Let's just say I would not have made the same choices Nora made.

There's also a somewhat vague and confusing scene near the end of the book where Nora talks with her dead husband. It's difficult to figure out what exactly they mean in their conversation. My students and I read it aloud to each other and pondered it for a while, and we have an interpretation that's quite intriguing and surprising, one I also have not seen mentioned in any of the reviews I've read. It's a total spoiler though, so I'm not going to tell you. But here's the deal: if you read Nora Webster, don't trust the critics. Trust your heart. And then give me a call, and we'll talk!