“Oh, there’s no pleasure. I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question.”
– Colm Toibin, on writing, to the UK’s Guardian, 3/2/09
Quite a bit of controversy was stirred up by this sentiment, uttered as it was by an acclaimed Irish author who has been twice nominated for the Booker Prize, but who went on to say that the money means more.
It’s apt, though, because to read Toibinâs new novel, “Brooklyn,” is to get a sense of what the author no doubt felt while writing it: grim and determined.
The plot itself is simple: Eilis, a young woman who has grown up poor in post WWII Ireland, is offered a job and housing in Brooklyn. It is there that she begins to discover what she wants out of life (to become a bookkeeper and get married).
Eilis – whose name reads as a play on Ellis, as in Ellis Island – also begins to rebel against the constraints of her religious upbringing, which in most Irish Catholic stories means having premarital sex.
Elegantly and simply, Toibin captures Eilis’ homesickness for her native Ireland and her family, the particular way New York can swallow you up whole.
In time, Eilis adjusts and falls in love with Tony, a nice Italian-American boy who takes her to the movies and Coney Island. But Tony and all the characters, really, remain flat on the page. She marries him, but when Eilis’ family suffers a sudden loss, and she goes home and falls in love with another man, this doesnât seem so much tragic as totally normal: Of course she does. Sheâs barely out of high school.
Despite his glaring lack of specificity – there is almost no detail particular to any neighborhood in Brooklyn – Toibin has full command of the Irish psyche. Of Eilis’ ambivalence about America, and her decision not to talk to her mother about it: “She imagined that her mother knew everything . . . they could do everything except say out loud what it was they were thinking.”
Would that the author, however, was able to fill in the blanks.
Brooklyn
By Colm Toibin
Scribner