A Guest at the Feast: Essays  by Colm Toibin 2023

Toibin is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic who is the Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia. His work has received almost every honor possible including something called the ‘the UK and Ireland Nobel’, the David Cohen Prize in 2021.  I recently read and reviewed his latest novel, ‘The Magician’ and loved it.

These essays, written between 1995 and 2022 and initially published in the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, were collected in this volume for reasons that are unclear.  Without benefit of a preface or introduction by Toibin, the why, when, and what behind this book are confusing.  There are three parts to the essays and an Epilogue.

Part One deals with an essay about his encounter with testicular cancer that begins with the wonderful sentence, “It all started with my balls.”  The second essay is an extended autobiographical return to his childhood in rural Ireland which at times was boring, but still beautifully written as all of his work is.  A third essay deals with a libel suit around printing a controversial story in a magazine which he edited and again, is not that interesting.

Part Two’s three essays deal with three popes—John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.  The essays were oddly fascinating for this non-Catholic reader since Popes from the time of my childhood and Pope John XXIII and Vatican 2 have always been of great interest to me.  Toibin, an openly gay man, focuses largely on how each of the three popes dealt with the issues of pedophilia, gay priests, and child abuse.  A surprisingly interesting set of essays.

The final part’s three essays deal with three writers whose work is strongly influenced by their religious faith—-Marilynne Robinson, Francis Stuart, and John McGahern.  I’ve read most of Robinson’s works about the two families in Iowa and enjoyed all of them.  Toibin’s incisive analysis of the impact of her deep religious faith on the works was interesting.  Stuart, on the other hand, was unknown to me and will probably quickly fade from memory.  His works would largely be forgotten except that he broadcast from Berlin during WWII and his later career was overshadowed by accusations of collaboration and Nazi sympathy.  McGahern is the most interesting of the bunch—an Irish short story writer who lived in isolation in rural Ireland for the last decades of his life.  Just last week, I found a volume of his short stories in a Little Library in Cambridge and brought it home.   His novel, ‘Amongst Women’, was one of Susan Hill’s Final Forty and also sits on my shelf, waiting to be read.

Toibin is an exceptional writer and like all such artists is worth reading even if it’s an essay about a long dead Pope or a libel suit in Ireland forty years ago.  Fine volume.