In two of his acclaimed novels, “The Master” and “Brooklyn,” Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who lives in both Dublin and New York, established his mastery of the historical novel. Except for the opening tale, his new short story collection, The Empty Family, sticks largely to present day Ireland, America, and Spain. The longer pieces tend to be the strongest, since they give readers a chance to care about the characters, but overall, I prefer Tóibín's novels.
Many of the stories, including the title one, feature unnamed gay narrators, who are living remote existences. In “One Minus One,” which was previously published in The New Yorker, the narrator returns home from New York to Ireland to say goodbye to his dying mother. In “The Pearl Fishers,” the narrator meets a married couple for dinner and recalls the affair he had with the husband when both were still in high school. (For fans of “Brooklyn,” Tóibín is far more sexually explicit in his short stories than he was in the 1950s-set novel.)
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There are a couple of nods to “The Master,” Tóibín's novel about the repressed life of Henry James. The “Portrait of a Lady” author guest stars in the opening story, “Silence,” in which a 19th-century woman remembers an affair, and another character reads James's work further on.
Reflecting on lost love is a prominent theme in many of the stories, such as “Two Women,” in which a set designer takes a job in her home country of Ireland after the death of a former lover. Most of Tóibín's characters are well-to-do, involved in writing or film, and living chilly, expatriate lives. The exception is one of the strongest entries, “The Street,” a 68-page novella in which a Pakistani immigrant tries to adjust to his life as an indentured servant in Spain.