On page 51 of Colm Tóibín’s 1992 novel, “The Heather Blazing,” the narrator’s father, sitting outside and grading papers, loses his straw hat to a sudden gust of wind. It is a passing image that marks the time within a flashback. On the second to last page of the book, the narrator, grown up to be a judge and now old and chastened, tries to remember. “His father, he remembered, wore a straw hat. He saw it blowing off as his father sat at a table, and paper blowing as well in a sudden gust of wind. He could not remember where this was.”

This little connection runs like a chord beneath the arc of the story. Looking back to page 51, the reader has the opportunity to remember what the narrator can’t.

Mr. Tóibín employs his readers’ minds when he writes. He is like those directors of horror movies who have you imploring heroines not to go through that door. In Mr. Tóibín’s case, the reader begs the character not to keep that secret, not to take that person for granted, not to be so fatally discreet!

It makes sense that Mr. Tóibín wrote so well about Henry James in his 2004 novel, “The Master.” In that book, James suffered because of what he could not say to other people. None of Mr. Tóibín’s characters ever says enough to his loved ones. But Mr. Tóibín’s fiction succeeds because he clearly shows why the character cannot speak: The girl in the horror movie has no choice but to go through the door. And Henry James has very wellstated reasons for not entering.

The characters are generally less articulate in “Mothers and Sons” (Scribner, 288 pages, $24), Mr. Tóibín’s new story collection. Most hail from the Irish countryside, from villages or small towns where the expectation of rumor complicates private expression.

Because the stories in this collection are about mother-son relationships, and those relationships often leave so much unspoken, Mr. Tóibín’s interest in privacy leads him to illustrate the silent pride of sons.

“A Summer Job” tells the story of a boy and his possessive grandmother. As he grows up, he starts to spend the summers with her. In public, they act almost as if they’re flirting:

John stood up and, taking his white linen napkin in his hand, began playfully and lightly to brush against the old woman’s head with it, as though he were assaulting her, making her laugh until she began to cough loudly.

Mr. Tóibín doesn’t let us know what to think about words like “assaulting her.” He might even welcome the odd sexuality flitting in his pages, but in the end he sides with the odd stolidity of the teenager, John, who refuses to sit vigil when his grandmother dies. “Have I not done enough?” he asks his mother. “Will you answer me that?” His pride is circular.

The mother’s own privacy sometimes trumps her relationship with her son. In “Famous Blue Raincoat,” the son, Luke, digs out his mother’s old records, from her days with a folk band, planning to burn them onto CDs. The mother remembers how the band went bad: The breakup led to the mysterious death of her sister in Fresno, Calif. She does not want to hear the songs again; she says nothing to discourage her son. Her discretion would seem angelic, were Mr. Tóibín not conditioning us, throughout this volume, to associate discretion with self-confidence.

The fullest story here, “The Name of the Game,” pits the mother against the whole town. Even her son is initially suspicious when she installs a chip shop adjacent to the old family grocery. Loans are difficult; her husband left her in debt. The health officer calls. The neighbors complain. “Tell them to back off,” she tells a powerful friend. Then, as business picks up, her reputation turns around. She rejoins the community, and her son takes a keen interest in the business. The townsmen believe “he’ll make a great fist of the business.” But when he asks for the complete financial record of the business, and she tells him the litany of her travails, she realizes how little a son understands. “When he asked her for precise figures, she realized that he had completely ignored the story of what she had been through, and the effort she had made.”

The inability of characters to experience their own stories is not lost on the reader. Mr. Tóibín’s concern with emotional reserve and myopia works itself out better in longer forms, but the stories collected here demonstrate the merits of his consistent theme.

blytal@nysun.com