Brooklyn: A Novel
by Colm Toibin
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Book Reviews of Brooklyn: A Novel
Book Review: Caught Up in the Second Great Irish Diaspora
Summary: 5 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"Brooklyn," comes to us from Irish author Colm Toibin, who is the author of five previous novels, including The Blackwater Lightship: A Noveland The Master: A Novel, each shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. "The Master" also won the "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize in fiction, and the highly-regarded International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Eilis Lacey (I've no idea how to pronounce that given name, have never heard it before, in fact), finds herself unwillingly part of Ireland's second great Diaspora, the twentieth century one: like so many others, she's forced to leave her hometown, tiny Enniscorthy (also, apparently, Toibin's hometown), for lack of work, although she's a good bookkeeper. (The first great Diaspora was, of course, that of the terrible 1860's Famine.) So, anyhow, at the instigation of Father Flood, a local priest who has found a parish in what was still, then, in the 1950s, the great Irish city of Brooklyn, New York, she unhappily leaves her little room, her Mam, and her glamorous, worldly elder sister Rose. Father Flood finds her a job in a Fulton Street store and a room in a Clinton Street boardinghouse in his parish. Eilis battles homesickness, learns about Brooklyn's bitter cold winters and blazing hot summers; and its local professional baseball team, the Dodgers; goes to Brooklyn College nights to learn accountancy, and meets a man. Then bitter news calls her back to Ireland, and throws her future into doubt.
Toibin certainly has a way with a female character, and in Eilis he has created a very believable young woman. He has also very accurately and beautifully created her surroundings in Ireland, and in Brooklyn. However, the bitter news that calls Eilis back to Ireland closely parallels the "Deus ex macchina"that the author of the last Amazon Vine book I read used to get her character where she wanted her. And then Toibin uses yet another "Deus ex machina" to help resolve his protagonist's future.
Many reviewers have complained that the novel's first 100 pages, largely about Eilis's life in Brooklyn of the 50's, bored them. I part company with them there. I'm Brooklyn-born myself, and often say I was born a Dodger fan and a Yankee hater, as my mother was about to give birth after the first Yankee-Dodger World Series, in 1941. And my family moved to Long Island, in 1950, as many of the characters in this novel either are talking about doing, or have done. But we still loved the Dodgers. My husband, who's also Brooklyn-born, first-generation, to Irish immigrants in one of those all-Irish parishes, was eagerly anticipating his eighteenth birthday, so he could sell beer on his summer job -- that's where the big money was -- if you were hawking food and drink in the Dodgers' home, Ebbets Field. And just as the lad was nearly there, Dem Bums up and left. Furthermore, I moved back to Brooklyn as an adult, and lived there for many, many years: I can tell you Toibin has accurately placed every street he mentions. My husband and I know them all well: know Brooklyn well. Toibin captures it to the life. Give the man an extra star.
Book Review: An extraordinary ordinary girl
Summary: 5 Stars
When Amazon readers react so differently to a novel, as they do here, something is going on, most likely in the novel. Most of the reviewers' negativity seems to be variations of `but nothing happens'. Well, let's see why that reaction might occur. Colm Toibin has created in Eilis an `average' Irish Catholic girl and traces her journey through perhaps the most difficult time of a person's life: the years from late adolescent into young adulthood. Toibin gives Eilis the added challenge of living through that crucial period in the context of emigrating from Catholic rural Ireland to the urban melting pot of Brooklyn, then back again to Ireland.
Instead of our hero being outsized in emotional or physical or material resources, placed in unexpected situations (i.e."something is happening to someone interesting") here we are shown how an ordinary person might react to the ordinary challenges (and tedium) of such a external and internal journey as well as to its few (but crucial) decision points. It is no small feat for a mature male writer to keep the narrative firmly focused on an "ordinary" young woman's responses to a life that presses, sometimes quite insistently, on her retiring, pre-feminist uncertainty. Never does the author intervene to stand apart from or above Eilis's self-understanding, nor does his prose ever remind us of its skill. So does Toibin invisibly envelops the reader in Eilis's experience, much as she herself is.
And indeed, isn't Eilis's life the sort of that most of us live? Life goes on, from day to day, in a routine way,even if it is a difficult one; then some obstacle or opportunity emerges which we face, like it or not, with our ordinary intelligence and ethical skills (or lack of them). Eilis seems in some ways, a female Willy Loman, but as a figure who may enjoy a happy life, as opposed to Miller's tragic Willy. She, like Willy, is ordinary--yet we care about her fate as if it were our own: what will she decide about Tony, about going home to Ireland, about returning the Brooklyn? These are the events that will define her life (and her ethical self) though she does not always recognize this (as we sometimes do not) and she, like us, does the best she can (which is none too good at some points and wonderfully courageous at others). She is, in a word, human-- and to create such an ordinary `heroine' is a triumph of literary art.
Novels surely serve many purposes; they can take us to other worlds, introduce us to fascinating people with the tragic passions of an Anna Karenina or the towering rage of Ahab. But occasionally, a novelist will present us with someone with an more or less ordinary life...and make us see how extraordinary that life appears to the one who lives it through. Just as ours is to each of us.
In regard to the last point, one major reservation There was a `deus ex machina' quality to the solution of Eilis's final choice: whether or not to return to Brooklyn. To make her development complete (and so the novel), she should have been allowed to make her own decision, rather than having it forced upon her by a somewhat unlikely chance event (though to be fair, life often seems to produce such accidents). Still, to become fully human seems to involve making ethical decisions through an act of the will. This , in the end, Eilis was not allowed to work out, and she and the novel are the poorer for it. Still, Brooklyn is a major work of art, whose issues, as several readers have noted, remain for us to puzzle over long after we have finished this brief and beautiful story.
Book Review: An extraordinary talent, at his finest.
Summary: 5 Stars
OK, Man Booker award people, listen up! If this book doesn't win this year, you are dead to me, you hear?
Colm Toibin is a genius. This is a man who has, on various occasions brought me inside the heads of:
* a gay man in Ireland suffering from AIDS, and the women in his family ("The Blackwater Lightship")
* a compromised Argentine English teacher exploring his sexuality in the time of the fall of the military junta ("The Story of the night")
* Henry James in his middle years ("The Master")
* an IRA gunman turned art thief ("Mothers and Sons")
* an Irish high court judge ("The Heather Blazing")
* and, most recently, Eilis Lacey, the stunningly ordinary, but completely unforgettable, heroine of "Brooklyn", this latest novel.
Where does Toibin's particular genius lie? Well, there's the writing, of course. Which is remarkable for being so completely unremarkable. If that seems like a backhanded compliment, let me assure you that it is meant as quite the reverse. I think it takes a phenomenal talent (and a certain gutsy confidence in one's own talent, which the author most definitely has, and just as definitely has earned) to write as unobtrusively as Toibin does. Nothing in his style draws attention to himself as author. Instead, time after time, he finds the right voice, so that the writing flows in a completely natural way, without a word in the wrong place.
How does he do this? The answer brings us close to the scary heart of his genius, I think. It's because Toibin lets his characters take over in a way that few other authors manage to do. He becomes them, he channels them. To say they are "fully realized", "deftly drawn", that they "come to life on the page" - whatever reviewer's cliché comes to mind - doesn't even begin to do him justice. Empathy is surely one of the qualities we expect from any great novelist, and Toibin does empathy like no other modern writer I know. I find his ability to inhabit his characters both fascinating and scary. It scares me because it so exceeds my own powers of imagination.
But it's one of the reasons I prefer fiction to non-fiction - if only vicariously, I find that truly good fiction has the power to take me out of myself, and to stretch my capacity for empathy, even if it's only briefly. In his novels, Colm Toibin does this over and over again. I imagine it as being a wholly draining experience for him. But as a reader, my admiration for him is boundless.
Of all of Toibin's novels, this one resonated with me the most, presumably because of my identification with the main protagonist as an immigrant to the U.S.
Mild spoiler alert: For the final 30 pages, as Eilis has to choose between two radically different possible futures, my heart was in my mouth. The denouement was such a relief. I could certainly identify with her feeling trapped between both worlds.
I think the power of "Brooklyn" is sufficient that it will be affecting for anyone who reads it, not just those who have gone through the whole displacement that accompanies the Irish immigrant experience.
If there is any justice at all in this world, this book simply has to win this year's Booker prize*.
Read it. Read all of Toibin's books. And see if you don't agree with me.
*: "Brooklyn" has been `long-listed', I am happy to report.
Book Review: "She was nobody here...Nothing here was part of her...It was as though she had been locked away."
Summary: 4 Stars
Colm Toibin, long recognized for his sensitive character studies, adds to his list of fine accomplishments with this memorable study of young Eilis Lacey, on her own in New York while the remainder of her family stays behind in Enniscorthy, County Wexford. It is less than a decade after World War II, jobs are hard to come by, and the economy in Ireland is a disaster. When Father Flood, an Irish priest with a parish in Brooklyn, returns home for a brief vacation, he suggests that he can find Eilis a good job. Though Eilis is woefully unprepared for the cultural changes that she will face, she decides to leave the familiarity of home for a new world. "Parts of Brooklyn are just like Ireland. They're full of Irish," she is told.
Focusing on the minutiae of life, which is Eilis's own focus, Toibin recreates her passage across a stormy Atlantic, her introduction to life in a Brooklyn boarding house, with its assortment of characters, and her experience as a saleswoman at a department store in the ethnically changing Brooklyn neighborhood where she lives. She sometimes attends Saturday dances at the local parish hall, and she attends night school, studying to become a bookkeeper/accountant. It is certainly not an exciting life, and it is not an exciting plot, yet Toibin recreates Eilis's feelings within these scenes so minutely and chooses his descriptive details so carefully, that her life becomes a delicate drama, a life filled with universal themes "writ small."
As she faces the challenges of her new life in Brooklyn,we see her as immature, naïve, and touchingly anxious to please. Sometimes timid, she is also, on occasion, almost impossibly righteous. Despite her firm grounding in her Catholic faith, however, she is surprisingly enigmatic and vacillating--reluctant to take chances--and she can try the patience of her reader as much as she does some of the characters in the novel. Through his simple and straightforward language and imagery, however, Toibin allows us to share Eilis's inner life, and we come to know her on an emotional level. Immature and "unformed" as she may be, she is understandable and comes alive. When she meets Tony, "innocent, eager and shiny," at a parish dance, it appears to be an ideal romance.
A trip home leads to the climax, in which Eilis, like so many other emigrants before her, must confront how much she may have changed, if at all, as a result of her experience in another world and what she sees as her future. Readers may argue about the "rightness" of the conclusion, the realism or its lack in Part IV, and the extent to which the author relies on coincidence to resolve the action, but in his characterization of an often conflicted main character (and in the vibrant supporting characters), Toibin has created a memorable novel which proves that a character "drama" like this need not always be shocking in order to be "dramatic." n Mary Whipple
The Blackwater Lightship: A Novel
The Master
Book Review: 3 plus, 4 minus for 'Brooklyn'
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Colm Toibin is an adept writer who elegantly captures the feeling of despair, longing, loneliness, passivity, and acceptance. All of these seem to follow Eilis, the main character in 'Brooklyn.' There are several characters and interactions that are vividly portrayed here, as well. However, in total, one does not walk away from the book with a keen sense of place. This is a character-driven book. There is, essentially, little plot and little action.
I would not call this a classic immigrant story. Eilis's voyage to America, life in a boarding house in Brooklyn, as well as a job on Fulton Street all seem precipitously planned for her by a Father Flood. She seems to be deeply rooted in her Irish Village and is very connected to her mother and sister Rose. However, Eilis possibly does not communicate the depth of this 'connectedness' since she shares [with the reader] her questions as to why it is she who is being uprooted rather than her sister Rose. Rose is her vibrant older sister who has an office job, plays golf and dresses with a certain flare. It is Rose who seems to embrace life more than Eilis. However, it may well be for this very reason that Eilis was chosen to experience something new and different.
We travel, third class, with Eilis from Ireland to America, and it is an arduous crossing. We feel her homesickness, her utter despair at being alone in a foreign land. However, with the help of Father Flood, Eilis soon is even more occupied with night classes at Brooklyn College. [I loved the exchange between Ellis and the Business Law instructor. She seems so earnest, and he appears utterly taken by her interest in the topic he is trying to teach.] Unfortunately, there are too few of these types of verbal exchanges within 'Brooklyn.'
Readers who think that they will learn more about Brooklyn and/or reconnect with that borough will be greatly disappointed. Readers who are interested in experiencing the blooming of a fairly unanimated character's emergence might enjoy this book.
When Eilis returns home due to a family tragedy, she emerges as someone with [dare I say] some panache -- especially in her attire. She seems, somewhat, freer with her emotions, as well. Eilis does remind me of the type of person why might be counted upon [relied upon] during troubling and/or hectic times. These are admirable people. While they are not always interesting, they are often, in the final analysis, important individuals.
There are some unanswered questions here, and it is my opinion that this was meant to be. Who engineered this migration for Eilis? Who is her benefactor?
This book does not totally engage, on a consistent basis, but when it does, it is quite good. If you are a patient reader, 'Brooklyn' might suit you. If not, it might disappoint.