Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

When you lose someone central to your life, who you are changes. It's not on purpose, not precisely, and it's not to suggest that you deformed your life around that person, but there is a truth that the people you are around do have an influence on what you do, and where you go, and who you are. It's not necessarily negative, it's just life. It's part of being part of a family  When they are gone, it's not that you flower or blossom, it's that the way you grow is going to be fundamentally different from the way you would have were they still there.

That's where we are with Nora Webster, the eponymous character in Colm Toibin's novel. Living in Ireland in the late 1960s, right around the start of The Troubles, she is a mother of four, none of them very small children, who has recently lost her husband. We only meet him through her memories of him, and one encounter that was either a dream or a ghost.

This is not a book fully of overflowing emotion and grief. It is a smaller, quieter grief, a numbness that doesn't ever entirely go away, even though Nora gradually gets to a point where it is less on her mind. Her husband died in an illness that took a few weeks, but no more. She doesn't angst over it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't cause her pain. She doesn't want to go back to the cottage they spent happy summers in, so she sells it. She doesn't agonize over it, she just does it. More on her mind is the judgement she might face from family and neighbours over disposing of the property.

We quietly go with Nora as she faces her new life - getting a job, or rather, getting back an old job, with a supervisor who hates her, working for people she went to school with, who do not know how to approach her. We see as she gradually enlarges her social circle, as well as seeing her discomfort around her own sisters, and greater comfort around her in-laws, who were there as her husband was dying, and with whom she shares the knowledge that they all know all there is to be said about that.

Her older daughters are already away from home at school and college, and figuring out what their own lives look like, while her two sons are younger, although still old enough to be left on their own if necessary. There are no stereotypical struggles here. These relationships are not always easy, but they are not always hard, either.

Nora is invited out to help score a trivia night in a nearby town, and through that, is invited to both a music appreciation society that her husband would have scoffed at, and singing lessons. She finds both difficult and satisfying, and again, I like it about the book that everything is quietly complex. Not emotionally or disproportionately difficult, but just a little bit complicated.

We also get the ways in which women in this world navigate the people around them, and how that differs from men. Everyone seems to go through a local nun, for one, if they need something communicated that, for whatever reason, they can't say themselves. Then there are divisions of class power that govern relationships, and far away, are the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, protests in support of which Nora's younger daughter gets involved.

This is one of those slice of life books, but it's a very particular life, in a very particular moment. It made me think about my mother, and her experiences after my father died. I think there was more obvious emotion there, but there were all the small moments that were her figuring out what her life was going to look like without my father, and although my parents had complemented each other amazingly, there were things she could then do that were not what she would have done before, and were part of her figuring out her new day-to-day. It's not an easy process, but it goes on all the time, and it's not something we think about.