The Seventies! The decade of flares, chevron moustaches and disco. Well forget all that. In Long Island, Colm Tóibín’s sequel to Fifties-set Brooklyn, it’s frosted glass doors, Vietnam protests on the tele and people suddenly trying to give up ciggies after years of carefree chain-smoking that indicate we have skipped forward two decades.
Brooklyn (2009) followed small-town Irish girl Eilis Lacey across the sea to New York, complete with a transatlantic love triangle. Readers loved it, it made Tóibín a mega prize-winning author and the film adaptation helped launch Saoirse Ronan’s career.
Now Tóibín returns to find Eilis settled with her Italian-American husband Tony, their two kids, and their extended family living in a commune on Long Island. How sweet, how boring. Well Tóibín thought so too, so in the opening pages he chucks a narrative grenade at beloved protagonist Eilis that blows up her world and gets the book going.
Tony, plumber by trade, has been doing “a bit more than was in the estimate” and has apparently knocked up a customer. The family plan to take in the baby, Eilis says she won’t have it. With the whole thing falling apart she goes back to Ireland for the first time in two decades, citing her mother’s upcoming 80th birthday.
Despite its title Long Island, like Brooklyn, can’t get away from Enniscorthy, the small Irish town in County Wexford from which Eilis (and the author) hail. In Brooklyn, it was everything Eilis’s new life in New York wasn’t. Now the dynamic is a bit different.
After moving out of the city to the family commune — a pipe dream of Tony’s in the first book — Eilis is just as boxed in as she was in her hometown all those years ago, particularly when the illicit pregnancy emerges (the whole family quickly find out, even their teenage children). The only thing that could send her back to town she’d left, it seems, was somewhere even more oppressive.
The episodes are generally quieter, with a few exceptions, and Tóibín can go wandering on paragraph-long ruminations
Eilis has a harder edge now. She is fierce in the face of her husband’s apparent failure, happily argues with relatives and no longer takes any shit about her background. “I’m as American as you are. My children are American,” she declares when challenged, having absorbed the American Dream. Back in Ireland she almost performs the role of the immigrant made good. The money she splashes — on a brand new kitchen for her mother and a flashy rental car — is a $2,000 handout from her actually successful brother-in-law who pities the “hard time” she is having.
Part of the praise for the original book was its rendering of the immigrant story — a socio-economic phenomenon, a demographic event — into a special, empathy-triggering story of one young woman. Tóibín has successfully developed that thread in Long Island (and how timely it is!).
Just how settled is middle-aged Eilis, really? The will-she won’t-she question of the first novel feels less and less resolved as this sequel goes on. Of those new kitchen appliances Eilis buys, left standing in her mother’s hallway, we get the not so subtle observation from the over-the-shoulder narrator: “The longer they remained there, she believed, the more impossible it would be to return them.” The arrival of her kids Rosella and Larry raises the stakes.
I picked up this book straight off the back of Brooklyn, with its sublime rendering of Eilis’s adventure, and particularly brilliant set-pieces like the first transatlantic voyage when, wracked with seasickness, she finds the toilet locked. Long Island I found marginally less magical. The episodes are generally quieter, with a few exceptions, and Tóibín can go wandering on paragraph-long ruminations about the logistics of running a fish and chip shop, the irritations of being a pub landlord, etc. He can also slide into descriptively ungenerous passages of dialogue (Where are they? What are they doing with their hands?, questions I can’t help asking). But, like Eilis, he has earned his right to roam. Fans who have waited 15 years for this book will be chuffed.
Ethan Croft is editor of Londoner’s Diary
