Toibin presents an evocative, engaging portrait not only of 'three prodigal fathers,' as he calls them, but of Dublin in the 19th and early 20th centuries ... Toibin...is an impressive, graceful writer ... he moves nimbly in this book from biography to literary criticism to personal narrative, with glimpses of himself ... This is a thrilling reading that aptly unites Toibin’s novelistic gifts for psychology and emotional nuance with his talents as a reader and critic, in incomparably elegant prose ... The book unavoidably invites questions about the nature of the father-son bond—and then mostly avoids them. That’s to Toibin’s credit ... Always an understated writer, who prefers innuendo to inflection, in this book he evinces a talent for the deadpan ... as Toibin’s wise and resonant book makes clear ... sometimes even an imperfect father gives his son wings and teaches him to fly.
Tóibín takes a personal approach to biographical discovery, dovetailing reminiscences of his own Dublin days with anecdotes about his subjects ... For all this interconnectedness, Tóibín manages to give each literary father a section of his own ... The last stretch of Tóibín’s book is the most straightforward, the closest in method to conventional literary criticism ... even in its plain-spoken final section, this gentle, immersive book holds literary scholarship to be a heartfelt, heavenly pursuit.
Great white literary fathers are not in vogue right now ... Forget those preconceptions, however, because Mr. Tóibín’s investigation into the lives and legacies of what he calls 'three prodigal fathers' is juicy, wry and compelling ... the august academic origins of Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know don’t cramp Mr. Tóibín’s relaxed first-person style here ... Mr. Tóibín is writing here as a psychoanalytic literary biographer, somewhat in the Janet Malcolm mode. Thus, like its subject, the critical approach of Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know is also out of fashion these days. But, if a critic is going to rely on Freud, what better place to do it in than a book on fathers and sons? Mr. Tóibín’s approach yields especially charged assessments of John B. Yeats and John Stanislaus Joyce—both of whom were Olympian procrastinators and scroungers ... Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know is an entertaining and revelatory little book about the vexed relationships between these three pairs of difficult fathers and their difficult sons.
Tóibín never labors his book’s point about the excesses of masculinity, preferring to focus on telling details and their analogues in his subjects’ work. Through them, he makes Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know an engaging study of influence, ambition, love—and their discontents.
Although a great deal of work has clearly gone into them, the essays have a sketchy, even unfinished quality, perhaps the result of having started out as a series of lectures. They are less biographical studies than Yeatsian portraits, pictures made by looking from different angles rather than analyzing. Tóibín’s refusal to pin his subjects down can be frustrating, but it is not unproductive. Echoes, patterns, and contradictions are left for the reader to assemble, in effect making us each our own impressionist portrait painter, or our own novelist ... Tracing the social web that connected this paternal trio (and kept them apart) offers a neat way into the cultural, political, and sexual history of Ireland’s eminent Victorians, their fraught and ambiguous sense of themselves, their class, and their relationship to England.
... each of the essays in it comes with the mild but confounding sense of lifelessness and disorganisation one often finds when reading words that were written originally to be spoken aloud ... I think, too, that we’ve probably already heard quite enough – too much – about Wilde and his strange, passionate family... Reading about all this again made me feel as I do when I’ve eaten too much cake. All the same, there is something interesting and insightful to be found on almost every page ... I cannot tell you how affecting I found this: Tóibín’s open-hearted interpretation of the letters almost as much as the notes themselves. Desire goes on and on and on, and never believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
The reader ought really to have a working knowledge of De Profundis, Easter 1916, and Ulysses. This is not Dubliners for dummies ... This is a book about all manner of things. About being an Irishman in an Englishman’s writing world, about ardour in old age, about measuring a man by his gaze, about freedom and spirit-crushing incarceration, about homosexuality, tolerance, reputation, class, duty and loyalty. It is about the sins of the fathers — debt, self-delusion, drunkenness — and the legacy left to their sons ... It is not a mad book, certainly not a bad book, but it is an odd book ... Tóibín’s portraits are often moving, always interesting and made me tearful as I listened to my father and brother planning a boys’ trip to, as it happens, Dublin. But it is a demanding book. And it is odd.
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know is not a book of new material per se, and the very readability of the essays might perhaps obscure what is innovative and exciting about them ... Tóibín finds the human, the personal connection between father and son, the realignment of family relationships, and in turn rehumanises through context these canonical writers and their works ... These are essays in the best sense of the word: searching, funny, exploratory, generous, with a willingness to reach out and humanise, through frequent acts of empathy, both the major and minor figures of these three families. Throughout them, Tóibín holds the gaze, is watchful and intent and charming, and (as a welcome bonus) tells us more than a little about our own selves along the way.
...[a] poignant and engrossing tour of his Irish literary hinterland ... In a book that folds astute literary criticism into a moving meditation on the gifts (and debts) that parents pass to children, Toíbín shows that this trio of titans all rebelled against their fathers, yet repeated the pattern of their lives ... Toíbín summons both generations in essays written (as he says of Wilde’s prison testament De Profundis) 'with passion, intensity and some wonderfully structured sentences.'
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know offers richly drawn portraits of these fathers and sons, illuminating the influence rippling between generations ... As charming as it is illuminating, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know provides a singular look at an extraordinary confluence of genius.
In the three essays collected in Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Irish novelist Colm Tóibín takes a refreshingly oblique angle on a trio of towering literary stylists of the last era, all sons of Irish-born fathers. In a graceful oral style befitting the book’s origin as a series of university lectures, Tóibín explores the parental imprint — sometimes biographical, often creative — on the lives and work of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce ... Tóibín doesn’t try to forge a connection between his biographical abstract and the life and work of the Wildes’ son. But, come on! Who cares? It’s a fascinating backstory, immensely revealing about the culture of late-19th-century Dublin ... Thanks to Tóibín’s wry and learned commentary, we get to see in Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know a great deal of these arms-length Irish fathers and the worlds they inhabited.
Irishman Tóibín's... new book analyzes the effect exerted on the masterful literary works of Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce by their fathers, all three of whom were forceful Dublin figures in their own right ... The bigger picture here, though, is a vivid and knowledgeable depiction of nineteenth-century cultural life in the Irish capital, when Dublin lay depressed in a political slump because the Irish parliament had been eliminated from Dublin by the Acts of Union of 1800, a malaise that lasted until the Republic of Ireland was founded later in the twentieth century. Tóibín portrays three giants of Irish literature and their city in a new and clarifying light.
Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce weren’t just three of the greatest writers of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. As Irish-born novelist and critic Tóibín demonstrates, they also suffered serious daddy issues ... A short but entertaining, thoroughly engaging study on the agony of filial influence.
Fans of early modern literature will enjoy this look by novelist Tóibín at the fathers of three of Ireland’s most acclaimed authors. He explores a milieu they shared—the 'small Dublin world' of the 19th century—and the many connections among their three families. W.B. Yeats’s grandparents and father knew Oscar Wilde’s parents, and a younger Yeats 'would later dine at the house of Oscar Wilde in London.' ... However, Yeats and Joyce’s fathers, both named John, and respectively a painter and a musician, found little contemporaneous fortune. Despite the focus on fathers, the works of the sons pervade this book, and Tóibín illuminates them with fresh readings ... Originally delivered as a series of lectures, this study balances dexterous narration and Tóibín’s scholarly familiarity with his subjects’ place in Irish political and social history.
