contemporary lit – Mysterium Coniunctionis

I’ve been struggling all year to finish books. I’m currently engaged in about 2 dozen different books, some substantially. But so far in 2026 I’d only finished one. Desperate for a quick read, I remembered I had Long Island by Colm Toibin available.

Toibin has written and spoken about Henry James with depth and sophistication. He of course wrote a delicious novel about James called The Master. As a prose stylist, Toibin is far from James and those labyrinthine Laocoon-esque sentences. But thematically he is a direct descendant. The characters and events in Long Island could have been written by James around the era of The Awkward Age or What Maisie Knew (but Long island would have been merely a novella to James). Of primary concern in the novel is Eilis and her family and a sudden disruption which launches her on a return to Ireland after 20 years in New York.

Eilis has every reason to be happy with her current circumstance, but her husband has betrayed her and has not committed to accept her terms for a continuation of their life together. Back in Ireland for her mother’s 80th birthday, she becomes a chaos agent and derails the lives of several former acquaintences in a cool, non-chalant manner. But she must be forgiven, for she knows not what she does, or the consequences of her actions, because everyone is too concerned by appearances and impressions to be honest with each other.

In James’s novels, the Americans in Europe were often innocent naifs, manipulated victims of far more sophisticated Italians, French, or English from ancient families and fortunes. Here it’s rather the opposite, where a dazzling Irish girl who’s built a life in New York returns to wreak havoc amongst the small-town yokels. This is a quiet novel and very interior to the concerns of a handful of characters, but I found myself falling deeply for all of them, and felt terribly the potential for catastrophe as the plot unfolded. I was, as I typically am when reading Toibin, totally absorbed.

I’ve been going back through the physical library and pulling down unread volumes lately. In the last six months four of those have been novels by Philip Roth.

Roth wrote Everyman shortly before killing off his alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman in Exit Ghost. I think Everyman is a superior novel and a more beautiful meditation on mortality and death than Exit Ghost.

The novel opens with the death of the main character, who remains unnamed throughout the story. We attend his funeral with some family and some former lovers, and then we are inside the mind of the dead man as he projects backward in time. I believe this is only the second novel I’ve read where the entire story is told from the point of view of a dead dude, the other being The Living End by the delightful Stanley Elkin.

The narrator worked in the ad biz but always wanted to be a painter. We see his triumphs and failures and his major regrets. We meet his children and his three wives and some of his lovers. We encounter his parents and siblings, and the theme which ties everything together is decay and death and their inevitability. Hence the title Everyman, because no one escapes death, and as a result the book is basically about all of us. Perhaps we get to buzz back through and revisit our time here after we go to our final rest? It’s a comforting thought.

There is a beautiful scene where the narrator visits his parents’ graves in a dilapidated cemetery in an unsafe part of New Jersey before going in for a surgery he does not survive. He meets the gravedigger and there is a beautiful moment between the two men, one whose living is digging holes for the dead, and one who is about to die. The scene’s got “Alas, poor Yorick” chops.

Roth was a substantial artist and a chronicler of the USA in the decades leading up to its decline into irrelevance and buffoonery. He confronted his end with dignity and continued to work until his final moments. I am grateful to have his novels as a roadmap to my own final decades.