Ms. Hen reviews Nora Webster

Nora Webster

Colm Toibin

Scribner

2014

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she wanted to read an Irish book for St. Patrick’s Day. She started to read this years ago, but she does not remember when. She thinks that she read a lot of it, but she didn’t read the whole thing. She doesn’t remember why she stopped reading it, she thinks it might have been because it was not what she wanted at the time.

NORA WEBSTER is about a woman whose husband has just died, who has four children, and it’s about how she deals with her grief, and tries to get her life back together. The novel takes place in 1960s Ireland in a small town. Ms. Hen has never lived in a small town, but she knows in such places everyone knows everyone else’s business. She has always thought that it would be nice to know all the people who lived near her, but after reading this she thinks differently. All Nora’s neighbors are in her space, and she’s afraid to walk down the street wearing a new dress or hairstyle without everyone noticing and commenting on it. She wants to be her own person, but she is used to having her husband make all the decisions.

Nora is a woman of her time. If she lived in an era after this, she would have been a different person, but women in Ireland in this age were stuck in one place, and did not have opportunities to do much else. Nora joins a club called The Gramophone Society, where people get together to talk about music. She discovers she likes classical music, and buys a record player and several records. She also takes singing lessons, but attempts to hide these new activities from her family.

There are places in this novel where the character gets outside herself when she listens to music, and thinks about a life she could have had but didn’t. She is visiting her new friends from the Gramophone Society and they play a record of Beethoven, and Nora looks at the photo of the young woman on the cover and thinks, “As Dr. Radford put the record on, she thought how easy it might have been to have been someone else, that having the boys at home waiting for her, and the bed and the lamp beside the bed, and her work in the morning, were all sort of an accident. They were somehow less solid than the clear notes of the cello that came through the speakers.”

She thinks what everyone must think sometimes, that if the person could have lived a different life, would her life be better? Would she be happier? There’s no guarantee that she would be happier, but she doesn’t know. This is an example of the saying, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” We all think other’s lives are so much better, but we never know for sure. She also thinks that music has come to stand for her fantasy life that she does not have, an alternate existence full of music, far away from the dullness of working in an office, and trying to find privacy in a town where everyone knows everything about her.

There are some brilliant flashes in this book, and it’s well written, but Ms. Hen found it was not quite right for her to read right now, similar to what she thought the first time she tried to read it. It’s a nice book, though there is a little edginess to it, now she craves edginess, danger and fear. She wants to live someone else’s fear instead of her own. She has a finite amount of books she can read, and since the libraries are closed, and she can’t leave her house, she has to read what she has in her pile.