Author Profile: Colm Tóibín on Singular Natures and the Intimacy of Fiction

“Literary fiction is the only way we have, really, of seeing somebody thinking something and saying something else, and the distance between the concealment and revelation,” said Irish novelist Colm Tóibín in an interview with The Crimson.

Tóibín has been lauded by The Boston Globe as “simply one of the world’s best living literary writers.” He has been nominated four times for the Booker Prize: in 1999 for “The Blackwater Lightship,” in 2004 for “The Master,” in 2013 for “The Testament of Mary,” and in 2009 for “Brooklyn,” with the latter being made into a 2015 film of the same name starring Saoirse Ronan. Tóibín’s 2026 release, “The News from Dublin,” is his first collection of short stories in 15 years. It explores loss, grief, and silence through a diverse set of protagonists, ranging from an Irish teacher recently released from jail after being convicted for pedophilia to Lady Gregory, the founder of the Irish National Theater.

Though one might think that Tóibín has infinite compassion for these characters, Tóibín asserts that this could not be further from the truth.

“No, no, no, no, I mean, you know, if you start thinking about yourself as having infinite compassion, I think you would write the most awful books,” said Tóibín.

Rather than foregrounding himself as the author, Tóibín focuses on crafting each sentence so that it conveys the correct emotion — unpredictable and yet plausible.

“So you’re constantly just moving ahead slowly with some idea, maybe, some set of configurations in your mind, maybe a story even, but you work tentatively. And if you begin to think about yourself in any way, really, in any way at all, then the page is black. It’s not a mirror. Narcissus ended badly,” said Tóibín.

In an attempt to “try and see another person” rather than seeing himself, Tóibín writes many of his stories in a third person intimate point of view — where all sensory details are filtered through one character’s consciousness. This technique allows the reader to share everything that the character “sees, notices, remembers, wants,” which creates a connection between the character and the reader without the “otherness” of the first person “I.”

“And what you’re involved with is, in one way, a sort of form of self-suppression where you don’t exist. You’re trying to give everything to the character, see everything from the character’s point of view. And if you put yourself in, if you interpolate, then you lose it, because it’s delicate,” Tóibín said.

Although his preferred mode is third person intimate, in “The News from Dublin,” Tóibín experiments with the first person in two stories drawn from his own life — “Sleep” and “Barton Springs.”

“And you start with that idea that you can’t explain everything to everybody, that you’re in a constant state of censorship, you’re censoring all the time thoughts you’ve had, feelings you’ve had. And fiction is one way of, I suppose, ‘uploading’ this in a way, if you use a technological metaphor,” said Tóibín.

These silences are prevalent in Tóibín’s own upbringing.

“My uncle was involved later in the Irish Civil War, and it was considered immodest for anyone who was involved to speak about it. We had a neighbor who was sentenced to death. He was my brother’s godfather and he grew roses and was very grumpy about it if [someone] kicked a football into his rose garden,” said Tóibín. “But if he came to the house, it wouldn’t be to talk about it. It would be not to talk about it.”

At the heart of all his stories, is Tóibín’s interest in “the crooked piece of wood” — the “concealment, withholding, silences, ambiguities, reticences” of individuals that combine to form drama. The point of Tóibín’s storytelling is not to moralize or to tell a parable, but to explore “something that requires exploration.”

In the short story “Free Man,” when a child molester is confronted with his crimes by the prison psychologist, Tóibín uses words laden with “ambiguity and strangeness” to illustrate how the narrator is exerting himself in a “cruel and vicious” way while simultaneously managing to “leave it out of his consciousness.”

“It’s not something you’re going to empathize with so much as that you’re going to see how strange it is that he’s alive in the same way as I’m alive. So the question is, [whether] the reader would feel ‘how strange,’ or ‘it’s explored something.’ And he would put the book down for a second and just think ‘how strange.’ And almost that would be enough for me if someone just did that,” said Tóibín.

Tóibín’s interest in that which is singular is reflected in his taste in art. He loves the Vermeer painting “Woman Reading a Letter” for the realism brought forth through “the blues and the grays” of northern light.

“And, I suppose that those paintings, the sense of individuality — ‘This is not representative, this is not religious, this is not the Virgin Mary, this is not a sign of what gentlewomen looked like in that particular place. It’s an individual, she was there. She was in the room.’ I think for a lot of fiction writers, gave us a lot of inspiration,” said Tóibín.

Ultimately, Tóibín’s writing is concerned with a fundamental curiosity about the world, the psyches of other people, and a way of living rather than a strict moral code.

“So you want to be careful about thinking that there’s something a novel can do that sort of heals the world or saves things, but I think the reading experience, the immersion in other people’s worlds — I’m not sure it’s a moral good as much as just be the way we should live,” said Tóibín.

—Staff writer Laura B. Martens can be reached at [email protected].