Brooklyn: A Novel
by Colm Toibin
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Book Reviews of Brooklyn: A Novel
Book Review: Not The Brooklyn Of My Youth!!!
Summary: 3 Stars
I don't even know where to begin with this review as my thoughts are all over the place so it's best I start at the beginning. First off, I don't think it's a great idea for an author to give a name to a character that a good percentage of his readers won't know how to pronounce. In the novel Brooklyn, we are introduced to an Irish lass named Eilis. I've never even seen this name before and, when I first looked at it, I thought it said Elias. Consequently, every time I saw the name thereafter, I always pronounced it as Elias and clearly this main character was not an Elias. I know this is a minor point but it's one that bothered me.
I grew up in Brooklyn and, when I was living there, I couldn't wait to leave and, now that I'm gone, I'm always in search of any book that will bring me back. I guess that's what nostalgia is all about. Years ago, I came upon another book with Brooklyn in its title, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by Jennie Fields, and it's one of my favorites because it really brought me back there. Fields also grew up in Brooklyn so everything she wrote about was very authentic. I corresponded with Fields after that and it was she who recommended this book to me.
This story starts out in Ireland post WWII and it's where we first meet Elias....oh, excuse me, I mean Eilis. She's just out of school and looking for a job but, in her town of Enniscorthy, jobs are hard to find. She lives with her mother and older sister Rose and it's Rose's job that basically supports the entire family. Through a priest, who's visiting Ireland from Brooklyn, Rose arranges for him to sponsor her sister Eilis' emigration to the states where jobs are plentiful and a future is possible. Eilis is heartbroken to leave but goes along with the plan. Once she arrives in Brooklyn and begins her job, she's not sure if she did the right thing. But she perseveres and makes a life for herself working, going to school and eventually finding a boyfriend.
I really enjoyed the story Toibin was telling. Even though his main character is very passive, it works within the story. I loved all the supporting cast and felt they were all believable. But then the main problem came into play for me. It all started when Eilis is at Nathan's with her boyfriend and his brother and the author talks about them putting ketchup and mustand on their hotdogs. At this point, not being familiar with this author, I had to look at the back jacket to see where he was from and I could see he never lived in Brooklyn. I'd like to report here and now that no one, and I mean NO ONE, put ketchup on a hotdog at Nathan's in Brooklyn in the 1950's. The only reason Nathan's even had ketchup on its premises is for the french fries. Then one night, in the midst of a calamity, Eilis decides to take the train to her boyfriend's house in Bensonhurst. The author says that the trip should take a little more than an hour. A little more than an hour??? There's nowhere in Brooklyn that's going to take you more than an hour to get to via train from another location in Brooklyn. You could go all the way out to Suffolk County on Long Island in less time. I know these are things only someone from Brooklyn would probably pick up on but my feeling is if you're going to write a book that takes place in Brooklyn and then make the title of the book "Brooklyn", then you better have your facts straight before you put it out there for your readers. Or better yet, have someone edit it who actually lived there during that time.
Many times an author tries to make a location a character within the book. I love when they do this but there is no way Toibin tried to do this. He couldn't because he simply doesn't know the place. I never felt for one minute that I was in Brooklyn. Other than the trips to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, it could have been Anywhere, USA. While Eilis was working on Fulton Street in a department store, I would have loved to have had her make a visit to A&S or Mays department store. I would have loved for her to sit at a lunch counter drinking an egg cream. I would have loved for her to be walking in the street while watching some kids play stickball. I would have loved to see her witness a dog at a Johnny pump. This is the real Brooklyn but it's not the Brooklyn that came across on these pages.
At one point, Eilis makes a trip back to Ireland and it's here that the author, who is from Dublin, is clearly more comfortable. Even with everything I've already said, I was still enjoying this story and actually stayed up late one night to finish it. At this point, it was a 4 star book for me. Not great but certainly a good read. That is, until the ending where I feel the author must have gotten a call from his publisher telling him he had to wrap it up. Because that's what he did and before I knew it, the book was over. To say I didn't like the ending would be an understatement.....I hated it.
So nostalgia aside, because I never felt any, this Brooklyn was definitely not the Brooklyn of the 50's where I grew up. I agree with other reviewers that Toibin can write but it's a shame that my first introduction to his work was not a 5 star one.
Book Review: "The sadness won't last so we'll do what we can for you"
Summary: 4 Stars
Set in Ireland and Brooklyn in the 1950's this rather sad, melancholy novel traces the gradual maturing of Eilis Lacey who leaves her homeland and her beloved home for a time to work in America, leaving her mother, her sister Rose, and her friends. Living in the small village of Enniscorthy and still young and full of hopes and dreams, Eilis finds work at a shop, but the kindly Father Flood, the family pastor instills in Eilis a sense of adventure even as she bears the knowing gossip of her friends and the constant pressure from her mother to cross the Atlantic to seek her fortune. With Eilis's older bothers long gone to England for work, she grows older, always in the shadow of Rose, an avid golf player who seems to become ever more glamorous over the years. Elias is proud of her sister, of how she takes care of her appearance and whom she mixes with, so its not surprising that Eilis heeds her advice and tries to bury all of the fear and dread that she's going to lose her world in Ireland forever. She was looking forward to America and leaving home for the first time. America might be foreign but there was also "an almost compensating glamour attached to it."
Throughout her journey, Eilis is surrounded by characters who seem to have the best of intentions. Luckily, the kindly blond haired Georgina helps Eilis on the stormy voyage when she's wracked with sea sickness as she vomits up all of her boiled mutton amidst all of the shuddering and lunging as the huge ocean liner moves forward. Upon her arrival on Brooklyn, Ellis cannot believe the extent of her naiveté as she's forced to put up with the muddy humidity of summer and the freezing winters with the biting wind, carrying ice. There are also the days working on the shop floor of Bartocci's which seem to be the longest in her life. She battles crippling terrible weight of homesickness as Enniscorthy comes to her in flashing pictures and the life she had lost and would never have again. Meanwhile, she's stuck in Brooklyn with no friends and family. Even the other girls who lodge at Mrs. Kehoe's boarding house with their daily talk of changing fashions can do little to assuage the sadness that seems to melt into and float on the surface, constantly distracting her.
In this elegant novel, Eilis's life in Brooklyn is defined the social property of the time and also the constraints of religion, and her status as a girl of quality. Forced to follow the rigid rules of Mrs. Kehoe, her Mass on Sundays and the disapproving talk of boyfriends, Eilis just can't escape the feeling that Mrs. Kehoe is taking advantage and ultimately judging her, especially when she meets Tony, a friendly Italian American. It doesn't take long for her to begin to slip into Tony's world and that of his family and the apartment were he lives with his parents and his three brothers. After a sudden courtship - the trips to Manhattan to see films, to the beach at Coney Island, and to baseball games - Eilis is tumbled into self-doubt when she realizes that all Tony wants to do is to marry her while she harbors grand plans of a career as a bookkeeper. When disaster strikes and there's terrible news from home, Eilis is plunged into a new dilemma, forced to confront the dark confusion of her decisions. It is ironically Jim Farrell's clear blue eyes, not Tony's, that linger on her with an interest that is unmistakable. Soon enough, Eilis finds everything that has happened in Brooklyn almost dissolving, no longer richly present in her life, and she sees all three of them - Tony, Jim, her mother as figures she can only damage.
This novel speaks to a disparate and questionable long-distance love and the challenges and rewards of those who brave such a test. Eilis and Tony are quite different, but she eventually falls for his easy and relaxed manner, and that of his affable family, a fact that adds an added weight to their romance as it progresses from friendship to flirtation then to a serious commitment as Tony weaves his inevitable web around his muse. But as the climax of the novel suggests, Eilis' questionable obligation to Tony comes at a terrible price, the moral confines of the church and society eventually making Eilis's duty and commitment almost impossible to bear. Meanwhile, this gentle but rather uneventful novel plods along, the narrative lacking tension even though the author's specialty is the obvious growth of Eilis as a woman and as an independent spirit who is forced to face the ramifications of her life choices. Mike Leonard April 09.
Book Review: A Classic Saga of an Immigrant Coming of Age and Coming to Terms with Life in Her New Land
Summary: 4 Stars
Although it's a relatively slight work when compared to its prize-winning predecessor, THE MASTER, a brilliant treatment of the life of Henry James, the latest novel from Ireland's Colm Tóibín is a warm and finely observed tale of one young immigrant woman's coming of age in the America of the early 1950s.
At the suggestion of Father Flood, a New York parish priest, Eilis Lacey, a young woman from the village of Enniscorthy, County Wexford (Tóibín's own hometown), leaves her widowed mother and older sister in 1951 to make a new home in Brooklyn. It seems she has little to lose, abandoning a menial job in a grocery store and facing the chance to emerge from the shadow of her poised and accomplished sibling.
Tóibín recounts in gruesome detail Eilis's wretched weeklong ocean passage in a cramped third-class cabin. She takes up residence in a Brooklyn rooming house inhabited by five other young women and owned by the officious and opinionated Mrs. Kehoe, herself an immigrant from County Wexford. At first Eilis is overwhelmed by the novelty of her surroundings, in which "each moment appeared to bring some new sight or sensation or piece of information," but her fascination with the new world soon is overtaken by intense homesickness, especially for her older sister Rose: "She was nobody here. 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 meant anything." In a gorgeous passage, Tóibín describes how Eilis is both sustained and tortured by thoughts of her Irish home, of an "early evening in October walking with her mother down by the prom in Enniscorthy, the Slaney River glassy and full, and the smell of leaves burning from somewhere close by, and the daylight going slowly and gently."
Several months after she is settled into her job as a clerk at Bartocci's Department Store on Fulton Street, Eilis enrolls in night classes at Brooklyn College, where she studies assiduously for her bookkeeping certificate, her dream eventually to attain an office job. At a parish hall dance she meets Tony Fiorello, a handsome, earnest young plumber from Bensonhurst, and the mutual attraction, if not instantaneous, soon becomes obvious. Before long their relationship settles into a comfortable pattern: Tony "collects" her from her night class every Thursday; they attend the parish hall dance on Friday and take in a movie on Saturday night. Tony's feelings for Eilis grow more quickly than do hers for him, but Tóibín writes movingly and perceptively of the young woman's deepening affection for her uncomplicated companion.
In the midst of this intimate tale, Tóibín subtly alludes to the changes coming to the world of post-war America: the first "colored" customers at Bartocci's, the arrival of television, and the early days of Long Island's suburban boom, as Tony and his brothers dream of building family homes, and eventually a construction business, there. Eilis's comfort in this strange new world grows alongside her attachment to Tony, as he takes her to the crowded beach at Coney Island and to Ebbets Field, where he vainly tries to rouse her interest in the game of baseball that's incomprehensible to her.
When a family tragedy causes Eilis to return to Enniscorthy, she encounters Jim Farrell, a young pub owner for whom she develops feelings that rival the ones she holds for Tony, and she must decide whether she'll return to her roots in the sleepy village or to the new life she has carved out for herself in America. "It made her feel strangely as though she were two people," Eilis thinks as she reflects on the choice she inevitably must make, "one, who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother's daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew." Tóibín resolves that conflict with the same subtlety and mastery that characterizes the rest of the novel.
In his quietly perceptive prose, Colm Tóibín effortlessly captures the duality that lies at the heart of Eilis Lacey's story. BROOKLYN unassumingly offers both a classic saga of an immigrant coming to terms with life in her new land and an equally appealing story of one young woman's grasp of a hard-won maturity.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
Book Review: A Woman Honest About Her Feelings
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
It struck me as strange that Mr. Toibin entitled this book "Brooklyn" and not "Eilis". For the book seemed to be just as much about life in Ireland in the 1950's as life in Brooklyn. I also expected it to be much harsher than it was, and was so happy to see it was not so. It is rather old-fashioned, and I don't mean that in a negative way.
The book is about a young Irish woman named Eilis. She is a woman who is ultimately very honest about her feelings about life and people. (Yes, just the type of woman that makes martyr type women scream in horror and terror. How dare she not lie, lie, lie the rest of her life.) The author does a very convincing job of describing what it felt like to move far away to another country, with no relatives or friends along for the journey. At times I ached so much for her, I kept thinking: "Go home!" But she sticks it out, and her new world slowly becomes a very interesting one of sights, sounds, seasons and people...co-workers, a landlady, a priest, housemates, fellow students, friends and customers. The store she works in is trying to attract black customers for the first time. The Jewish professor teaching her business law class had his entire family wiped out by the Nazis. Those little stories made the book intriguing to me. Then, romance started taking over the story....
(And if you have not read the book yet, please stop reading this review. There are things I intend to comment on that may be "spoilers". I just can't see the point of writing a review when you can't comment on important issues, because it may spoil it for others. Personally, I never read reviews on fiction books until I have finished the book.)
Yes, romance takes over...and things start going downhill, in my opinion. Here you have a very intelligent working woman, trying to make a future for herself, and it all starts turning into a story about her relationship with an Italian plumber, and his world, and his family. Not that there was anything wrong with Tony, his occupation, or his family...but Eilis failed to realize something very important...probably due to the time period in which she lived...namely, it was important to find someone at least equal to her own intelligence level.
When Eilis returns to visit Ireland, the reality of this sets in...and yet she then finds someone else who is in some ways just an Irish version of Tony. And Mr. Toibin's description of how one feels when returning to one's own country...of how the life in the new country begins to seem like nothing but a dream...was superb. But it all ends up being a "no-win" situation for Eilis due to the time in which she lived. That fact and the ending seemed like a tip-off there would be a sequel down the line...although, apparently the author is not known for sequels. But, really, think about it...move Eilis into the 1960's and 1970's...what an interesting idea!
Personally, if she had to marry anyone at that time in her life, I think she should have found herself a kind, intelligent Jewish guy at college! They could have started their own bookkeeping/accounting firm. And their more equal intelligence levels, as well as the differences in their backgrounds, could have made their marriage very interesting. Because Eilis definitely seemed like the type of woman who would eventually get very bored with the role of housewife and mother, especially if married to a man of medium intelligence and interests. I don't think she realized that about herself, but definitely would one day...especially when the times started changing in the 1960's.
Book Review: lovely in writing and tone, a little slow
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Brooklyn is a quiet, lovely novel that is driven purely by character. Its story can be summed up quite quickly: Eilis Lacey lives with her older, unmarried sister and widowed mother in a small Irish town post WWII where finding work as a bookkeeper is difficult and where life doesn't change much. An Irish priest from Brooklyn with ties to the town sponsors her in America and Eilis leaves her family and town behind to work in a large dept. store in Brooklyn. She tries to find her place in the new country, at work, in her boarding house, and in a relationship with Tony, a young Italian plumber. Events call her back to Ireland and the question arises as to will she stay there and pick up the life she would have had in familiar settings or return to Brooklyn and her strange new life.
As mentioned, it's a quiet. domestic novel. No car chases or explosions, even the emotions are quiet--no screaming, no arguments. What carries the novel is Eilis' quiet dignity, her small insecurities and gentle blooming into a new world and life. Toibin catches it all so beautifully--the small town, the daily slights and hopes, the tensions and releases.
This is Eilis considering her journey: "it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance. In the silence that lingered, she realized, it had somehow been tacitly arranged that Eilis would go to America."
These are how most of these moments occur in our lives--they sneak up on us rather than announce themselves with loud fanfares. Toibin captures all such moments tenderly, subtly, beautifully throughout the novel, as when she realizes Rose, her sister, is giving up her chance at freedom for Eilis'; or when she realizes how serious Tony has become in their relationship. He does an especially good job at showing, slowly, her growing loneliness and her realization that this experience will forever change her: "none of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now."
Quiet bigger elements slip into the story as well--racial/ethnic tensions, views toward women changing, etc--nothing loud, but enough to create a fuller, richer sense of place and time and context and to mirror the smaller individual changes in Eilis. The prose throughout is sharp, precise, poignant, and effective--and all of that in efficient fashion--it's tight and concise for nearly the entire novel.
Which is one of my minor complaints. I love a slow, blossoming novel, and this is slow, but toward the very end I thought it slowed a bit too much, was just a little bit repetitive. But only in the last 40 pages or so. My only other minor complaint is that the male characters were curiously flat. All the female charactes, from Eilis to Rose to her mother to the boarding house owner, even the relatively minor store owner in Ireland were all drawn so sharply that the two major male characters--Tony and Jim--seemed washed out in comparison. Part of that was their personality, but they were missing that singular moment or line of dialogue that encapsulated them so fully.
But these were relatively minor complaints and certainly shouldn't hold you back from reading this. It's a bok that you sort of float in gently, that lingers afterward--highly recommended.