"Nora Webster" by Colm Toibin (Post One)

    I am some way into "Nora Webster," and in the first one hundred or so pages I have found it a very insightful exploration of the psyche of Nora, whose husband, Maurice, has just died after an agonizing and seemingly long-drawn-out illness. The chasm that has opened up in her life, her feelings about her two boys and their two older sisters, her relationships with her own sisters and their husbands---all this is explored with great sympathy and understanding. But--it IS slow going...
    Some of the blurbs seem to accept this as a merit of the novel ("I found myself unnerved and then exhilarated by Toibin's resistance to an artificially dramatic arc," says Jennifer Egan, an accomplished novelist herself), but I am beginning to want something to happen, and not just the skirmishes in the office where she takes a job, coping with a harridan of a supervisor and the prolonged telephone calls of the spoilt grand-daughter of the founder of the company, with whom she has to share an office.
    But I have a hankering for some big something to happen...and so I will persist...