A ‘Brooklyn’ sequel from out of the blue
Author couldn’t see how to continue the story, until it hit him
Colm Tóibín does not like being lumped into the same sentence as James Joyce. “I’m not even listening if you’re going to say that,” he insisted.
The comparison arose during a phone conversation from New York, where the author is teaching a course at Columbia University — a course that, not surprisingly, includes on its reading list Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
The occasion for the phone call was the incipient publication of “Long Island,” Tóibín’s 13th work of fiction and a sequel to his bestselling 2009 novel “Brooklyn.” The new book returns Eilis, the protagonist of the earlier work, to her Irish hometown of Enniscorthy, where she is reunited with her imperious mother, her erstwhile best friend, Nancy, and her old flame, Jim, now the proprietor of a local pub.
But it begins in Long Island, in a town described in almost granular detail, as befits a place that Tóibín once called home. He includes real places and street names, such that a tourist might recognize them from the book.
It was here that the interviewer got into trouble. The suggestion that “Long Island” might resemble “Ulysses,” a novel so geographically specific some have suggested it could be used as a road map to Dublin, prompted immediate pushback.
“That would be going a bit far,” Tóibín said. “‘Ulysses’ is a great novel.”
While Tóibín remains humble in the presence of the legendary Irish writer’s spirit, there is little doubt that the international success he achieved with “Brooklyn,” including the movie scripted by Nick Hornby that garnered its star, Saoirse Ronan, an Oscar nomination for best actress, has vaulted him into the upper echelons of contemporary novelists.
That might have made the appearance of a sequel a foregone conclusion. But, for a while at least, that was not even a prospect the author or his publishers contemplated.
“No one in publishing ever said to me, ‘We’d love if you would do a sequel to that book,’ ” Tóibín said. “People just assumed I wouldn’t do it.”
It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to write a sequel to “Brooklyn” as he didn’t see how it could be done. At the end of the earlier book, Eilis unceremoniously abandoned her Irish fling with Jim in favour of returning to the States and that, as far as the author was concerned, was that.
“When ‘Brooklyn’ ends, there’s nothing much more you can do,” he said. “She goes back and there’s no drama attached then to the next thing.”
Only when Tóibín came up with the idea for the opening scene of “Long Island” did he realize there was a way back into the story.
“Once I got the opening, which came out of the blue, I had a new novel,” he said. “It was the same characters, but I had something to dramatize. Without that, there would have been no book.”
That first scene, set on the eponymous island in New York state, features Eilis, now a wife and mother, receiving some life-changing news that will propel her back home to Enniscorthy: an inversion of the previous novel’s trajectory, which saw her abandon her small-town home for the glittering promise of the New York City borough.
“Long Island” is set in 1976, some 20 years after the events of “Brooklyn” and also the last year that Tóibín was a permanent resident of Enniscorthy.
His memory of the town and its environs allowed him to populate the novel with details accurate to the time: how people would dress, how they would speak, what their living rooms would look like.
Add to that the literary trope of an outsider coming to a place and disrupting the normal, everyday workings of its inhabitants, and Tóibín realized he had the makings of a compelling novel.
“You can go back to it as almost a folk-tale plot,” he said. “There was going to be a wedding and a stranger appears. Once you get a stranger at a wedding — someone who’s almost like a ghost — then you have a story.”
In unfolding that story, Tóibín leaned heavily on two of his major influences: Henry James, about whom he had already written a fictionalized biography, 2004’s “The Master,” and Jane Austen.
From the former, he gleans a psychological depth and a fascination with characters who move between the new world of America and the old world of Europe; from the latter, a focus on a closed society rife with gossip and also, ironically, somewhat taciturn about matters involving sex.
“Especially something like ‘Mansfield Park’ or ‘Washington Square,’ where you have a heroine who’s really quite reticent and subdued,” Tóibín said. “Eilis emerges more strongly in this than she does in ‘Brooklyn,’ but those sort of novels in which much is concealed (served as inspiration).”
If Eilis is a more powerful figure in “Long Island,” that too is ironic, since the new novel opens up the frame to encompass not just her perspective but that of other characters, including Nancy and Jim.
“It’s technically very difficult because, as each section begins, you have to go straight into a moment, as though everything is concentrated there,” Tóibín said. “If you overdo it, it looks too deliberate. There’s a lot of sighing and cutting and erasing and adding and reading again, because if you get that wrong the reader will get upset and confused: ‘Who is this? Where are we?’ And you can’t put the name of the person at the top because it just looks too easy.”
Tóibín is an author who seems preternaturally averse to taking the easy road in his novels, which have ranged far afield, fictionalizing the lives of James and Thomas Mann (in “The Magician”), or taking him to ancient Greece (“House of Names”) or the Middle East in the time of the Virgin Mary (”The Testament of Mary”).
“Of 11 novels, I have five of them set in Enniscorthy, but they’re not written in a row, they’re in between the other ones,” he said.
“You write about home, you go back to town, you think about family, you think about — not so much about history as about family, family, family — and when it’s done, when the book’s over, you think, ‘Oh, God.’ And therefore you want to go to anything at all just to get you away from it.”
In that sense, “Long Island” reads like a homecoming, as much for the author as for his main character.
It’s another brick in the wall of a writer who is quietly building an edifice that marks him as one of the masters of contemporary literature.
Just don’t compare him to James Joyce.