THE EMPTY FAMILY

Tóibín has perfect pitch, and so do all the other narrators in this magnificent collection of stories. Each one brings a living voice—distinct and lonely—to the prose. Tóibín himself delivers the second, eponymous, story. Even the waves “were like people battling out there, full of consciousness and will and destiny and an abiding sense of their own beauty.” The author’s performance is outstanding but does not surpass those of strangers who also make love to his words. Subjects run the gamut—or gauntlet—between an affair so decorous that it is only acknowledged in the publication of poetry under a false name and an encounter during which one man eats another’s “lemony sperm . . . as if it were jam.” B.H.C. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2011]