Book review: New Ways To Kill Your Mother by Colm Toibin

"EDUCATING an unintellectual woman is like letting a rattlesnake into the house; she will lecture you on the inner symbolism of Camus while the dinner burns," wrote John Cheever.

"EDUCATING an unintellectual woman is like letting a rattlesnake into the house; she will lecture you on the inner symbolism of Camus while the dinner burns," wrote John Cheever, the misogynist and sexually conflicted purveyor of American suburbia.

Bold, innovative, insightful and wry, the latest Colm Toibin offering shows the Irish writer once again flexing his critical literary muscle, as he did in The Master, except this is not a novel.

In these essays, Toibin casts a piercing eye on the relationships between revered writers like Cheever and their families and investigates the influence family brings to bear on narrative and characterisation.

His targets include Irish writers W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge and Samuel Beckett, as well as Jorge Luis Borges, Roddy Doyle and James Baldwin.

The introductory Jane Austen, Henry James And The Death Of The Mother notes that Austen's lovable yet meddling Emma, the diffident Fanny Price (Mansfield Park) and the spirited Isabel Archer in James' Portrait Of A Lady are raised by aunts, and this moulds their personalities and shapes their destinies.

Toibin's gift in choosing colourful, biographical details about his subjects deftly reels the reader in. Yeats' erotically awakened bride started "automatic" writing on her honeymoon and the 50-year-old trembling Borges escaped his marriage to a woman hand-picked by his mother, in a taxi.

New Ways To Kill Your Mother
Colm Toibin
Picador, $29.99