By Tamara Moscowitz
Colm Toibin is among a handful of writers—Roddy Doyle and Neil Jordan, among others —who have garnered an international reputation along the lines of an earlier generation of Irish writers that counted the likes of William Trevor and Edna O’Brien. Toibin is a journalist, playwright, editor of several anthologies, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, but it is his five novels and literary awards, including being short listed for the coveted Booker Prize, that have won him critical acclaim. Known as a writer’s writer, Toibin’s beautifully crafted stories, nuanced sentences, and ability to reflect the sustained emotions and inner life of his characters have justifiably earned him their praises.
She felt as though she should move towards him as she saw him
hesitantly opening his overcoat and loosening his scarf. It was how
he stood, taking full slow possession of the room, searching almost
shyly for the place where he might be most comfortable and at ease
or looking carefully around to see if he knew anybody.
So observes protagonist Eilis Lacey in her restrained unemotional way as she attentively watches a man enter church for Christmas dinner in Toibin’s much lauded sixth novel, Brooklyn, published last spring. A familiar story, a coming of age tale in the early 1950’s, follows Eilis Lacey, a young diffident woman who lives with her widowed mother and older sister in the County Wexford town of Enniscorthy (Toibin’s birthplace). Three brothers work in England, leaving the females to a life of routine and ritual within the perimeters of community, church, and family. Elilis goes about her business, keeps up with her bookkeeping studies and works in a shop on Sundays, when one day she is jolted from her comfort zone. Rose, her more aggressive, sophisticated sister, has orchestrated her emigration to America to escape the confines of provincial village.
With the help of Father Flood who has roots in Enniscorthy, but is now a Parish priest in Brooklyn, Rose maps out a plan for Eilis to live in a boarding house, work in a local department store, and attend bookkeeping classes with hopes that opportunities will emerge. Perplexed as to why Rose wouldn’t go, a much better choice she thought for an adventure, Eilis panics at the prospect of venturing into the unknown. Too passive to rebel and too reticent to express her concerns, Eilis boards an ocean liner to America enduring the kind of rough waters that leave passengers reeling to arrive in a strange and gritty new world known as Brooklyn.
Settling into the life that was planned for her by Rose and Father Hood, Eilis longs for home and is filled with nostalgia when letters from her family arrive. She grieves. She drifts. Brooklyn is “strange, false, empty.” When Eilis meets a young Italian-American, Tony, she slowly begins to shed her former shelf, to adapt to a new place and to allow his affections and attention to permeate her entire being.
Nearly three-quarters into the story a tragic event forces Eilis to return to Enniscorthy where she is tested in coming to terms with who she is and who she will become. It is this decision that frees her to resolve her struggles and mature into a fully realized woman with an independent mind and spirit.
Adding a rich dimension to the novel is Toibin’s keen journalist’s eye for atmospheric details of time and place. The swelling of the Irish and Italian immigrant population in the 50’s, the Saturday night dances bringing divergent cultures together, the bustling streets of Brooklyn, the smoldering heat from the pavement, the excitement and bright lights of Manhattan are vividly described and are juxtaposed against the sheer poetry of Toibin’s words for the bucolic landscape of Wexford county and the intimacy of village life.
Brooklyn can be viewed as a predictable, matter-of-fact story, told many times over, but what sets this story apart from the genre are Toibin’s gifts as a writer and his poignant characterization of people’s troubled and conflicted lives.
