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PROJECT SAFE AND V D A Y UGA PRESENT
The VAGINA MONOLOGUES
“Eve Ensler’s funny, provocative ode to all that is female."
• The Flagpole*
Sponsored by
Dishaw Chiropractic and Managed Medical Transport
Co-sponsored by UGA Pet forming Arts
Tickets are $15 and are Available at the Door or at:
Frontier • 193 E. Clayton Street/ Downtown
Urban Sanctuary Day Spa • Milledge Ave., 5 Points
Project Safe Thrift Store • Bell's Shopping Center, Hawthorne Ave.
100*'.. of proceeds benefit Project Safe, Inc., a non-profit
organization that provides shelter, support and Resources
to women and children affected In domestic violence.
FEBRUARY 15-17, 8:00 p.m.
UGA Chapel on North Campus
REV.
DRAMA
A few stories in Colm Toibin's first’collection are regrettably
short. Better that they should be novels, or films or that newly-
anointed paragon of popular storytelling, the HB0 series. That
said, a few stories are absolutely brutal, like the final one about a
father and son coping with the loss of their wife and mother to a
freak snowstorm. The aftermath is enough to make one yearn for
the comforts of something only mildly depressing, like a trip to a
third-tier nursing home.
Mothers and Sons is a
thoroughly unpretentious
collection. It paints nuanced
portraits of people dealing
with a sprawling tapestry of
crises. Fans of flashy prose
or experimental narratives
might grow impatient with
it, as the style is conven
tional by anyone's standards.
The title advertises an ex
ploration of mother-and-son
relationships, and while the
implications might range
from the flowery (think
Hallmark commercial) to
the freakish (think Norman
Bates), it reads as more of a
coincidence than a driving
theme. A mother and a son are present in all nine stories, true, but
their relationships often just hum in the background.
Toibin is a writer who defies quick branding. His last novel
about Henry James, The Master, won a bookshelf full of awards.
His fiction has been set in Spain, Ireland and South America. It's
worth mentioning that he's gay but has never been pigeonholed in
the gay fiction ghetto. And he's a gay Irish writer who, until his
fourth novel. The Backwater Lightship, dealt with homosexuality
in countries other than his native peat—a phenomenon similar to
that of parents who feel some unwritten moral code requires them
to cross a state line before performing the sex act.
The best pieces operate on several levels at once. Take "The Use
of Reason," the opening story about a Dublin criminal. The man is
a natural-born thief, as disciplined as any Olympic gymnast. Yet
he's part of an underground society whose codes are severe. He's
done time in prison, killed people. During a job, however, he's no
brute: "He would rob more than two million pounds of jewelry, but
he would give a man back his loose change." The reader yearns to
be in on the logistics of his heist, and to siphon off the sense of
self he seems to possess—the lucidity required to size people up,
be they informers or potential allies.
The thief grapples with how he might sell two Dutch paintings
he recently boosted. His expertise is in jewelry; art is beyond his
ken. Trusting two art dealers seems too risky. He lingers out of his
element in a way he hasn't for many years—even prison was less
confounding. At the same time, his mother, a garrulous drunk, has
been particularly loose with her tongue regarding his whereabouts.
Figuring out what to do about her and the paintings conflate, as
their source is vulnerability. It's an emotion foreign and toxic to
someone who has learned to snuff it out from a young age with no
help from anyone.
In "The Name of the Game," a widower in a small Irish town
copes with an inheritance of debt. Her late husband came from a
family presumed to be wealthy, though it's simply not the case:
their small grocery store is failing. So, she scrimps and borrows
and opens a late-night fish and chips shop and, later, a liquor
store (or "off license," as they're known).
Toibin nails the details of a small business, right down to the
woman's daughters who start bringing their clothes to the dry
cleaner to free them from the stigma of cooking oil. After reading
this Horatio Alger of fried potatoes, one can suddenly imagine how
running a chip shop can be an act of feminist subversion.
The author never overplays his cards or declares his allegiances
in a distracting way. The drama rises organically from situations
that are inherently dramatic (a chance encounter between a long-
estranged mother and son) and seemingly banal (a son forced to
spend one last summer with a doting grandmother). Toibin teases
the drama out of the everyday while bringing the extraordinarily
dramatic down to a scale that's both easy to grasp and hard to
avoid. He does this quietly.
Because Toibin is so adept at nuance and detail, the shorter
pieces feel abbreviated. We know he can take us in for a compre
hensive tour of so many different worlds—that however poignant
a short scene might be, it leaves us wanting a bit too much. But
there are worse things a writer can do than leave a reader despon
dent, but yearning.
EVERYDAY
John Dicker
10 FLAGPOLE.COM • FEBRUARY 14, 2007
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