NEW WAYS TO KILL YOUR MOTHER Writers and Their Families

For fiction writers and readers alike, there is no more fascinating subject than personality and no setting in which personality so reveals itself in all its peculiar glory as the family. Tóibín, master fiction writer, is concerned here with how family patterns and circumstances embed themselves in writers’ work. He himself reads the opening essay on Austen and orphans and aunts in Victorian literature, providing a welcome chance to link the writer’s voice with the man’s. Gerard Doyle reads the rest, on Irish writers Synge, Yeats, Becket, and more, then such others as Thomas Mann and John Cheever, Tennessee Williams and his sister, Henry James and his. Doyle occasionally falls into a repetitive rhythm, incantatory but distracting, but otherwise serves this absorbing text extremely well. B.G. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2012]