MIRACULOUS NOVEL TAKES ON LIFE OF ITS OWN
Long Island is Tóibín's heartbreaking sequel to Brooklyn
In (Long Island), Eilis experiences the reverse of her original journey: a return home, this time after several decades away and during a profound personal crisis.
Colm Tóibín has an unhurried way of inviting the reader into his fictional world, like a perfect host who spoils you with delicious food and drink, but at such a gentle pace you never feel overfed. Quite the opposite: When the feast is over, you are instantly ready to return for more.
Tóibín has set several novels in a fictional reimagination of his hometown, Enniscorthy, in County Wexford, Ireland. He visits it in The Heather Blazing (1992), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), Brooklyn (2009), Nora Webster (2014) and again in his latest, Long Island. In each book, some of the characters' stories and encounters intersect — some lightly, others with great precision and intensity. A major character in one novel may nod a casual “hello” to someone who is the main protagonist in another work. They have known one another for years, even generations. Each of Tóibín's novels stands on its own merits and can be read independently. But to be aware of their shared roots is to understand the literary wisdom of finding an entire world of meaning and perspective in one small town. If you are so deeply familiar with its layers of sounds and echoes, you can write them into a symphony.
Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn, which was a gently told but searing story about the pain and hopefulness of emigration. In the 1950s, Enniscorthy has little to offer the novel's very young, soft-spoken but increasingly confident heroine, Eilis Lacey, whose older sister encourages her to go to America. Reluctantly, and with sadness, Eilis embarks on what feels like an enforced adventure. In Brooklyn, she lives in an area populated with residents from her homeland, but meets and falls in love with Tony, a son of Italian immigrants. Their love is tested when Eilis has to return to Ireland to support her mother after her sister's unexpected death. Having quietly wed just before her departure, at Tony's insistence, the “Americanized” Eilis returns home and keeps her marriage a secret. Her intriguing reappearance in Enniscorthy causes a stir.
Like all émigrés, Eilis learns that the home one leaves behind does not remain frozen in time but continues to be real without those who left. Tóibín shows the oddly dissonant coexistence of the slowly eroding gaps left by the loss of those who emigrated and the émigrés' own, sometimes warped, memories of home.
During her visit, and against her expectations, Eilis rekindles an old promise of a romance with Jim Farrell, a local young man, but she returns to Brooklyn at the end of the novel. Long Island revisits the themes of home and loss from a completely new perspective.
Eilis is now in her 40s, the mother of two teenagers. She and Tony live on Long Island, in an enclave of private houses, all built for and inhabited by Tony's family. It is Tony's immigrant dream come true — but is it also hers? She hasn't seen her own mother in 20 years but is expected to blend with her in-laws like a long-lost daughter.
Eilis has a keen emotional intelligence and independence of spirit, along with a deep love for her children. Her relationship with Tony fluctuates over the years, but she considers it solid. She doesn't mind when, because of her political disagreements with Tony's father (she supports protests against the war in Vietnam, for example), it is suggested that she can spend Sundays on her own, free of the obligation to attend the large family meals.
But her sense of isolation becomes acute when she learns of a dramatic secret Tony has been keeping. Eilis faces this immense challenge with great dignity and self-control. The novel moves into a new gear when Eilis informs Tony that she is going to Ireland to visit her mother, who will be celebrating her 80th birthday. The children, who have never seen their Irish grandmother (I found this a little hard to fathom), will join her later.
In this novel, Eilis experiences the reverse of her original journey: a return home, this time after several decades away and during a profound personal crisis. Tóibín's most intriguing stroke is the way he softly steps back from his main character to fully reveal and explore the stories of others. Eilis's mother has become a wilful and difficult woman, but with a hidden strength that ultimately helps her daughter understand her own possibilities and make a bold, unexpected choice. Eilis's old closest friend, Nancy, now widowed and running a chip shop, is the counterpoint to Eilis's chosen life away from her hometown — including a connection with Jim Farrell. And Farrell himself, who never married and still has love for Eilis, is a quiet but fascinating character, with flashes of a surprising inventiveness. I loved a small moment when Nancy thinks about Nora Webster comforting her after her husband's funeral, deftly recalling a similar scene in the novel Nora Webster, when Nora received a visit from Eilis's mother. Three widows, three interconnecting narratives mirroring one another without overwhelming the reader with hidden signals.
Long Island is a stirring journey, but its author does not showily dictate its speed or direction. He creates a heartbreaking world but does not impose it; instead, he parts a curtain and allows time for a slow, intense deepening of the drama behind it. His characters' possibilities are instantly recognizable as the types of choices we all consider, but he also emphasizes the importance of truly seeing others and reflecting on how their lives might differ from our own. When Nancy looks at her old friend, she thinks: “In the years when she knew Eilis, she thought, and saw her every day, there was nothing special about her. Now she stood out. She seemed like a different person. Something had happened to her in America, Nancy concluded. She wondered what it was.”
This miraculous novel grows with exquisite intimacy out of the silences left by those who know and feel more than they can say.