Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:IT’S SPRINGTIME in Brooklyn, in the old Italian neighbourhood of Cobble Hill. But suddenly it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn anymore; suddenly the air seems that of a small Irish town, of a small Irish sittingroom, where a small Irish boy sits at a card table with his sisters, aunts and neighbours and learns to play his hand, writes BELINDA McKEON

Colm Tóibín, sitting at a cafe table on Smith Street, is talking about bridge. Not the bridge, the glinting marvel of stone and steel that soars out over the Hudson just blocks from here, but the card game, the game of chance and plotting and trick-taking, the game which, Tóibín has just announced, taught him more about writing novels than anything else. A moment ago, he was talking about the benefits of having to write long essays on literature and politics for publications such as the New York Review of Books; how the eye sharpens, how the mind gets a workout. And now, he says, it’s all really down to bridge. “It was the big training I got, intellectually,” he says. “It requires an enormous amount of planning and remembering.” Of long silences, working out what to do, working out when to yield. “It’s a way of thinking,” he says. “Of watching how the cards are distributed, of how to guess them. And for writing novels, that’s the skill you use.”