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Summary
Summary
From the award-winning author of The Master , a hauntingly compelling novel--by far Tóibín's most accessible book--set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s about a young woman torn between her family in Ireland and the american who wins her heart.
Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, Eilis cannot find a proper job in the miserable Irish economy.
When an Irish priest from Brooklyn visits the household and offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she realizes she must go, leaving her fragile mother and sister behind.
Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and studies accounting at Brooklyn College, and, when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian, slowly wins her over with persistent charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. Eilis is in love. But just as she begins to consider what this means, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her new life.
With the emotional resonance of Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes , Brooklyn is by far Tóibín's most inviting, engaging novel.
Author Notes
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland in 1955. He studied history and English at University College Dublin, earning his B.A. in 1975. After graduating he moved to Barcelona for three years and taught at the Dublin School of English.
In 1978 he returned to Dublin and began working on an M.A. in Modern English and American Literature. He wrote for In Dublin, Hibernia, and The Sunday Tribune. He became the Features Editor of In Dublin in 1981, and then a year later accepted the position of Editor for the Irish current affairs magazine Magill.
His first book, Walking Along the Border, was published in 1987 and his first novel, The South, was published in 1990. He wrote for The Sunday Independent as a drama or television critic and political commentator. He writes regularly for The London Review of Books.
He has written several other novels including The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary, and Nora Webster. The Heather Blazing received the 1993 Encore Award and The Master received the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He was short listed for the 2015 Folio Prize for his title Nora Webster.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Colm Toibin's engaging new novel, Brooklyn, will not bring to mind the fashionable borough of recent years nor Bed-Stuy beleaguered with the troubles of a Saturday night. Toibin has revived the Brooklyn of an Irish-Catholic parish in the '50s, a setting appropriate to the narrow life of Eilis Lacey. Before Eilis ships out for a decent job in America, her village life is sketched in detail. The shops, pub, the hoity-toity and plainspoken people of Enniscorthy have such appeal on the page, it does seem a shame to leave. But how will we share the girl's longing for home, if home is not a gabby presence in her emigre tale? Toibin's maneuvers draw us to the bright girl with a gift for numbers. With a keen eye, Eilis surveys her lonely, steady-on life: her job in the dry goods store, the rules and regulations of her rooming house-ladies only. The competitive hustle at the parish dances are so like the ones back home-it's something of a wonder I did not give up on the gentle tattle of her story, run a Netflix of the feline power struggle in Claire Booth Luce's The Women. Toibin rescues his homesick shopgirl from narrow concerns, gives her a stop-by at Brooklyn College, a night course in commercial law. Her instructor is Joshua Rosenblum. Buying his book, the shopkeeper informs her, "At least we did that, we got Rosenblum out." "You mean in the war?" His reply when she asks again: "In the holocaust, in the churben." The scene is eerie, falsely naive. We may accept what a village girl from Ireland, which remained neutral during the war, may not have known, but Toibin's delivery of the racial and ethnic discoveries of a clueless young woman are disconcerting. Eilis wonders if she should write home about the Jews, the Poles, the Italians she encounters, but shouldn't the novelist in pursuing those postwar years in Brooklyn, in the Irish enclave of the generous Father Flood, take the mike? The Irish vets I knew when I came to New York in the early '50s had been to that war; at least two I raised a glass with at the White Horse were from Brooklyn. When the stage is set for the love story, slowly and carefully as befits his serious girl, Toibin is splendidly in control of Eilis's and Tony's courtship. He's Italian, you see, of a poor, caring family. I wanted to cast Brooklyn, with Rosalind Russell perfect for Rose, the sporty elder sister left to her career in Ireland. Can we get Philip Seymour Hoffman into that cassock again? J. Carol Naish, he played homeboy Italian, not the mob. I give away nothing in telling that the possibility of Eilis reclaiming an authentic and spirited life in Ireland turns Brooklyn into a stirring and satisfying moral tale. Toibin, author of The Master, a fine-tuned novel on the lonely last years of Henry James, revisits, diminuendo, the wrenching finale of The Portrait of a Lady. What the future holds for Eilis in America is nothing like Isabel Archer's return to the morally corrupt Osmond. The decent fellow awaits. Will she be doomed to a tract house of the soul on Long Island? I hear John McCormick take the high note-alone in the gloaming with the shadows of the past-as Toibin's good girl contemplates the lost promise of Brooklyn. Maureen Howard's The Rags of Time, the last season of her quartet of novels based on the four seasons, will be published by Viking in October. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
This plaintive sixth novel from the Booker-nominated Irish author (Mothers and Sons, 2008, etc.) is both akin to his earlier fiction and a somewhat surprising hybrid. Tib"n's treatment of the early adulthood of Eilis Lacey, a quiet girl from the town of Enniscorthy who accepts a kindly priest's sponsorship to work and live in America, is characterized by a scrupulously precise domestic realism reminiscent of the sentimental bestsellers of Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber and Betty Smith (in her beloved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). But as Eilis both falters and matures abroad, something more interesting takes shape. Tib"n fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel's final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. Several deft episodes and set pieces bring Eilis to convincing life: her timid acts of submission, while still living at home, to her extroverted, vibrant older sister Rose; the ordeal of third-class passenger status aboard ship (surely seasickness has never been presented more graphically); her second-class status among postwar Brooklyn's roiling motley populace, and at the women's boarding house where she's virtually a non-person; and the exuberant liberation sparked by her romance with handsome plumber Tony Fiorello, whose colorful family contrasts brashly with Eilis's own dour and scattered one. Tib"n is adept at suggestive understatement, best displayed in lucid portrayals of cultural interaction and conflict in a fledgling America still defining itself; and notably in a beautiful account of Eilis's first sexual experience with Tony (whom she'll soon wed), revealed as the act of a girl who knows she must fully become a woman in order to shoulder the burdens descending on her. And descend they do, as a grievous family loss reshapes Eilis's future (literally) again and again. A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tib"n's ever-increasing skills and range. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In his latest novel, following The Master (2004), a celebrated and highly imaginative re-creation of the life of American novelist Henry James, Toibin maintains his focus on the past. Keeping the pace relatively slow and stressing the wealth of authoritative detail, he contrasts small-town Ireland and big-city Brooklyn in the early 1950s, highlighting the vast differences between the two in customs and opportunity. Eilis Lacey, a smart young woman unafraid of hard work, must leave employment-poor Ireland to find a more lucrative existence in booming New York City. Under the auspices of an Irish priest, Eilis secures employment at a department store and residence in a rooming house for young women. She meets a handsome, charming Italian man, and their relationship quickly flowers into love. When her outgoing sister dies in Ireland, Eilis returns home and must face the decision to stay put or go back to the more exciting life she had begun to create in Brooklyn.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVERY now and then, with a thrill of connection, you come across a passage in a book that feels as if it had been written with exact foreknowledge of your state of mind: a soothing, specific prescription for unquiet thoughts. During a long-ago solo trip to Rome - a self-assigned distraction after a difficult break-up - I remember opening George Eliot's "Silas Marner" while sitting at the window of a high room in a cold albergo (once a nuns' cloister) as strains of conversation floated up from the courtyard. Describing her protagonist's new start in a new town, Eliot wrote of the relief that "minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love" may feel on finding themselves in a "new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap." In such a setting, she wrote, "The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories." For Silas Marner, this "exile" was self-sought. But for Eilis Lacey, the biddable daughter at the center of Colm Toibin's new novel, "Brooklyn," her leave-taking from Enniscorthy, in Ireland's County Wexford, and her resettlement in New York in the fall of 1951 are imposed on her by her energetic, well-meaning older sister, Rose. Young, docile and incurious, unscarred by heartbreak or reversals of fortune, Eilis has no desire or need to quit her widowed mother, her friends, her familiar surroundings. Her "old faith and love" are intact, and she seeks no distance from her memories. But she submits to Rose's plan for her transplanting, bending to a superior force of will, wishing to do what her mother and sister expect of her, wishing to please. "Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, as her mother had done, knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbors, the same routines in the same streets," Toibin writes. "She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children. Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared." Confused by her family's "almost unnaturally happy" mood in the days before her departure, Eilis is relieved to hear her mother, in response to a friend's casual inquiry, blurt, "Oh, it'll kill me when she goes." But go she must, Eilis assumes, even though she "would have given anything to be able to say plainly that she did not want to go, that Rose could go instead." But the Lacey women cannot speak plainly to one another. "They could do everything," Toibin writes, "except say out loud what it was they were thinking." And so, too young to understand the consequences of her reticence, too obedient to bolt at the dock, too humble to imagine that her own life is her own business, Eilis boards the liner for America, an irrevocable step that her mother, her sister and Eilis herself might never have wished her to make had they thought it through. America is peopled, for the most part, by the descendants of immigrants who had the resolve, the daring and the detachment to leave behind the places and people they had formerly known. But Eilis isn't such a person; detachment isn't part of her makeup. It has been thrust on her by women who are as attached to home and family as she is. What were they thinking? They wouldn't, or couldn't, say. Colm Toibin, born, like Eilis, in Enniscorthy, is an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions. His characters and plots vary widely. In his beautiful, painful novel "The Blackwater Lightship," he coaxed a touchy, lone-wolf woman to stiffly re-embrace her mother, their reconciliation precipitated by her brother's battle with AIDS. In his best-known novel, "The Master," he animated the inner world of Henry James. And in his story collection, "Mothers and Sons," he tapped the hidden bonds and vexed motivations of diffident men and women - from thieves, shop owners and farmers to a grandmother who plays favorites and gay men who rally to the side of a friend whose mother has died. In one of these stories, "Famous Blue Raincoat," a woman listens to a song, recorded by her long-dead sister, taken from an album her son has found in the garage. The song "gave her a hint, in case she needed one, of her own reduced self, like one of her negatives upstairs, all outline and shadow, and gave her a clear vision of her sister's face." She did not want that clarity, Toibin adds. "She hoped she would never have to listen to it again." In another story, "A Priest in the Family," an aged mother accepts the fact that her son, a priest, will go on trial for molesting teenage boys. "When people stopped to talk to her, she was unsure if they knew about her son's disgrace, or if they too had become so skilled at the plain language of small talk that they could conceal every thought from her, every sign, as she could from them." Yet when her son urges her to leave town during the trial, to "spare" her, she refuses. "When he lifted his head and took her in with a glance," she observes, "he had the face of a small boy." She tells him: "Whatever we can do, we will do, and none of us will be going away. I'll be here." THROUGH all these books and stories, intimations of attachment, abandonment and strong feeling (felt but rarely spoken) fall like a plumb line. Toibin's new novel stands apart because its protagonist has such an uncritical nature that she doesn't see she has grounds for complaint, much less possess any impulse to initiate confrontation. But slowly, equably, and without malice, Eilis exacts a bittersweet revenge for the expatriation she never intended - or, rather, one unfolds for her unsought, organically. In tracking the experience, at the remove of half a century, of a girl as unsophisticated and simple as Eilis - a girl who permits herself no extremes of temperament, who accords herself no right to self-assertion - Toibin exercises sustained subtlety and touching respect. He shows no condescension for Eilis's passivity but records her cautious adventures matter-of-factly, as if she were writing them herself in her journal. Accompanying her on the ghastly voyage from Ireland to America, where the sea swell has all the passengers green and reeling, he soon brings her to a Brooklyn boarding house run by a respectable Irishwoman. Eilis numbs herself against nostalgia until letters from home awaken her homesickness. Then she grieves. "She was nobody here," she thinks. "It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty." Unlike Silas Marner, unlike intentional voyagers everywhere, Eilis hasn't sought the consolations of anonymity. And so, when she meets a man, an Italian-American named Tony, she does what her instinct dictates: puts down roots. When her family calls her back to Enniscorthy, Tony seems to her like "part of a dream from which she had woken." And yet, back in Ireland, Eilis knows that if she were in New York it would be Enniscorthy that seemed like a "strange, hazy dream." Is it surprising if a seed grows where it lands, once it's been scattered? Can it be helped? In "Brooklyn," Colm Toibin quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
This latest from Toibin (The Master) begins in the southwestern Ireland town of Enniscorthy during the early 1950s, where dutiful daughter, doting sister, and aspiring bookkeeper Eilis Lacey lives with her mother and older sister, Rose. Her brothers have long since left Ireland to seek work in England, and Eilis herself soon departs for Brooklyn, NY. Once there, she attempts to master living and working in a strange land and to quell an acute and threatening loneliness. Initially friendless and of few means, Eilis gradually embraces new freedoms. She excels in work and school, falls in love, and begins to imagine a life in America. When tragedy strikes in Enniscorthy, however, Eilis returns to discover the hopes and aspirations once beyond her grasp are now hers for the taking. Toibin conveys Eilis's transformative struggles with an aching lyricism reminiscent of the mature Henry James and ultimately confers upon his readers a sort of grace that illuminates the opportunities for tenderness in our lives. Both more accessible and more sublime than his previous works, this is highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09.]-J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.