Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin
Toibin’s 2009 novel, which won that year’s Costa Award, is a lovely and haunting story set in 1950s Dublin and New York. It tells of Eilis Lacey, born and raised in Enniscorthy, in Ireland’s County Wexford, and her immigration to the United States as a young woman. Her well-meaning sister, Rose, wants a better life for her, and so arranges for her passage, along with employment and a place to live with the help of a local priest, Father Flood, who oversees a Brooklyn parish in the Irish enclave. Eilis, whose nature is retiring and unassertive, goes along with the plan, to please both Rose and their widowed mother, and any hesitance, or uncertainty is put aside for Eilis’ betterment.we
We see Eilis’ transition to American life, the heady and bewildering discoveries of life in Brooklyn, and Toibin portrays her transition between worlds in his ordered, elegant prose. Here he describes one of her first walks to work:
” She liked the morning air and the quietness of these few leafy streets, streets that had shops only on the corners, streets where people lived, where there were three or four apartments in each house and where she passed women accompanying their children to school as she went to work. As she walked along, however, she knew she was getting close to the real world, which had wider streets and more traffic. Once she arrive at Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn began to feel like a strange place to her, with so many gaps between buildings and so many derelict buildings. And then suddenly, when she arrived at Fulton Street, there would be so many people crowding to cross the street, and in such dense clusters, that on the first morning she thought a fight had broken out or someone was injured and they had gathered to get a good view. “
Eilis acclimates, and soon Ireland becomes a distant place, its attachments growing more tenuous. She meets a boy, Tony, who introduces her to his family. And then one day, Eilis receives news that her sister Rose has died, and she returns Enniscorthy for the funeral. She finds her mother aged and unwell, and feels she must stay on, though she misses the new life she’s made for herself.
Toibin has said that the act of writing is that of giving an event language for the first time, an act that requires patience, focus and persistence in order to make clear. The last pages of the novel are satisfying in a way an open-ended conclusion rarely are, due largely to what Liesl Schilling calls Toibin’s ability as an “expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions.” In Brooklyn, this elevates a seemingly ordinary account to unforgettable.
-Lauren Alwan