Last year's other fiction binge was Colm Tóibín, which I quite liked. His fictions are constantly threatening to precipitate some doom out of the thick air that hovers all around the hesitant characters, though generally none does. The books are not _merry_, for a start. They follow people apparently out of touch with any social moment. A community feeling is never captured; the protagonist is invariably a restrained individual holding position in a resistant world. This protagonist is not, as you might expect, alienated, nor is the world estranged from us—we're not in Terry Gilliam's _Brazil_, for example, and nor do is the world of the novel portrayed as gone-mad, as in J.M. Coetzee—there just lacks a sense of connection, of comfort, of familiarity.

The South, The Master, and The Story of the Night, each give us the interiority of a loner, a shy man or woman who simply doesn't expect to have friends or to fit in, and yet hopes nonetheless to find relationship, even to feel at home in it. And if these protagonists are insular individualists, they're not proud, defiant ones—like Ayn Rand heroes, for example—they're cautious rather than cocky, and hopeful rather than entitled, and hypersensitive rather than, well, insensitive.

It seems even that these characters hope to negotiate brand-new terms to every relationship as it forms: the protagonist of The Story of the Night, in particular, lurks in bath-houses, hostels, and impersonal streets, hoping at times to luck into a conversation that spins into a relationship—maybe sexual—whose dynamics and constants we can't predict.

Tóibín is no writer for the average reader, but for those who can slow to his pace, he offers a document of the excitement that inheres to people with desire, sensitivity, and a sense of uniqueness covered in modesty.