Brooklyn: A Novel
by Colm Toibin
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Book Reviews of Brooklyn: A Novel
Book Review: Hugely dissapointing
Summary: 1 Stars
I have been a big fan of Toibin for several years. The Heather Blazing is one of my all time favourite novels. The Blackwater Lightship was excellent. The Master is very different to those earlier works, but hugely entertaining and compelling.
Brooklyn does not even begin to approach the standards Toibin has set for himself. In fact, I am sorry to say Brooklyn is an abject failure by any standards. It and the Sea by John Banville are the worst books I have read in the last eighteen months. (Banville is an appalling writer with a nauseating personality who should never have been published so the fact that the Sea was such a poor book was no surprise).
Brooklyn is flat and dull. This, incidentally, has little to do with Toibin's famously economical prose style - which I love. The principal problem is with characterisation. The characters are cardboard cut-out, lacking in complexity, unrealised and utterly unconvincing. The central character is so passive that it is scarcely believable and she simply can not sustain my interest. Toibin indulges in long descriptive passages telling us about his protagonist's state of mind, her intentions and reasons and her reflections on events. Very rarely however is any of this conveyed in conversation between the characters. There are very few passages of dialogue - certainly any meaningful dialogue. This, for me, is a telling manifestation of the characterisation problem. Toibin can not give these characters a voice - because he does not really believe in them. You combine this with a very dull chronology of events that is the framework for the story and really, you have nothing.
I completely disagree with the reviewers in the British media and the New York Times who are falling over themselves to find the positives in this novel. One reviewer suggests that the novel is in some way deceptively simple and subversive. So I suppose if you disagree with them it's just because you were not sufficiently alert or intelligent to see the subversion. Nonsense. They are being hugely dishonest about all this - why, I do not know. Toibin's editors and publishers are advising him badly and must only be interested in promoting him as a literary star - thereby promoting themselves.
Book Review: Irish immigrants in Brooklyn - a nice rendering
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Colm Toibin in "Brooklyn" attempts to give some fresh air to much written about the Irish immigration to the United States. I was wondering if there is anything new or any possible form that has not been tried with this subject...
The main character is a young woman, Eilis Lacey from Enniscorthy, who is skilled in accountancy, but, in the 1950s, cannot find a job in her town, despite the recommendations of her older, glamorous sister, Rose, who works in an office. Their three brothers are all working in England. When a priest from Brooklyn offers to take care of Eilis and arrange a good job for her if she comes to America, she agrees, therefore changing her life forever.
The novel unravels slowly, showing Eilis as a reasonable girl who is also quite lucky - the priest, Father Flood, really cares about her, the job at the department store offers prospects of advancement towards the office work, Eilis lives in a decent boarding house with several other girls, and her employers contribute to her tuition for college evening classes. Her life is purposeful and organized. Only her feelings are not so easy to tame...
Eventually, Eilis meets Tony, who wants to marry her - but then she has to go back to Ireland in an emergency and the promises she made to Tony may get broken...
I liked this novel very much - written in a simple, but suggestive prose, it reminded me much more of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" than, for example, of "Angela's Ashes". Rather old-fashioned in structure, it is simply a good story, which probably mirrors the lives of many immigrant girls from that period. I was impressed by Toibin's ability to enter the mind of a young girl - I think Eilis's feelings and doubts are very realistic. I only feel that this novel has some unfulfilled potential - I wanted more from it, felt unsatisfied, there were many threads that could be developed and the novel could have been longer, richer and deeper. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it.
Book Review: Flat writing style and frustratingly passive protagonist mar an otherwise interesting story
Summary: 3 Stars
Brooklyn is the fifth of Colm Toibin's books I've read (after The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, and Mothers and Sons), and the first in which I've been disappointed. The story of a young Irish woman who emigrates to Brooklyn in the 1950's is potentially very interesting -- and Toibin has certainly done his research about that time and place -- but, in my view, the story doesn't realize its potential for two reasons.
First, the book is written in a very flat, almost affectless style. (An earlier Amazon reviewer said it reads as if it were written for 12-year-olds, and I think there's a lot of truth to that.) Having read several of Toibin's other books, I know that he can write in a more sophisticated style if he wants to, so I have to assume he made a deliberate choice to write Brooklyn in this style. However, I'm at a loss to figure out why he chose to do so. In any event, the choice didn't work for me.
My second complaint is about the main character, Eilis Lacey, who is so frustratingly passive that she never makes a decision for herself, but allows all her choices to be made by other (mostly male) characters. (Spoiler alert: don't read beyond this point if you want to know absolutely nothing about what happens in the book, but I don't think what I'm going to say will come as a surprise to anyone who's read the first ten pages.) I'm sure it's reasonable to suppose that a well-brought-up young Irish woman in the 1950's who has never thought about emigrating would move to America just because a priest tells her to do so. And it's probably a safe bet that the same young woman, having met a nice young man who wants to marry her, would more or less drift into the assumption that her future life will consist of marrying the young man and having his children. But just because it's realistic doesn't mean I have to find it interesting or enjoyable to spend 262 pages in the company of that young woman.
I found the character of Eilis's sister, Rose, who stays behind in Ireland, to be much more interesting, and would have liked to know more about her inner life. As far as I'm concerned, Toibin wrote his novel about the wrong sister.
Book Review: Reads like non-fiction
Summary: 4 Stars
At the beginning of BROOKLYN, Eilus Lacey seems to be stuck in a dead-end small town in Ireland with no prospects other than working as a clerk in a grocery store, but then her sister arranges for her to get a job working in a department store in Brooklyn and she emigrates to the United States.
A Catholic priest has arranged for a place for Eilus to stay near the church and her landlady rules with an iron fist. Eilus is so homesick she seems to be going through drug withdrawal, but then the Catholic priest begins to hold Friday night dances and that's where she meets her boyfriend. Things are looking up at work, and she's taking a night course in bookkeeping, where she's doing very well. BROOKLYN is definitely a coming-of-age story. We see Eilus grow from a shy little wallflower to a sophisticated lady much like her sister, Rose, back in Ireland.
Perhaps the most interesting facet of the novel is the people Eilus interacts with. The lady she works for back in Ireland is downright mean. She treats her fulltime girl, Mary, like a slave and never loses an opportunity to tell her how worthless she is. The other girls who live with Eilus in the Brooklyn are just as spiteful in their own way. There's a young girl who lives there who is paying for her rent by doing odd jobs around the house. The other girls refuse to have anything to do with her because she's a "scrubber," someone who does menial labor. It's hard to figure out exactly when this occurs. It's sometime after WWII and we only get it nailed down when Eilus goes to watch the Dodgers play at Ebbetts field, the year after Bobby Thompson hit "The shot heard `round the world."
Although Eilus makes great strides as a person, she doesn't seem to be able to make up her mind, especially when it comes to men. When she is called home to Ireland for a family emergency, she falls back into her old lifestyle as though she's never left and Brooklyn seems like a dream, making her seem rather shallow. I have to give this four stars because I liked Eilus so much and because Tolbin doesn't try to jazz the story up by creating artificial twists.
Book Review: An Irish lass in exile
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Eilis Lacey is a young Irish woman, living with her widowed mother and her sister in post-World War II, economically depressed Ireland. When a visiting priest from the United States suggests that she could find work in there, she passively accepts her family's decision that she should emigrate. Initially, she is very homesick, but slowly learns to adjust to her new life and her new independence. Having fallen in love with an Italian (shock!), she suddenly finds that she must return to Ireland to deal with a death in the family. There, she must confront her family's expectations for her future, and well as her own.
As with all Tóibín's books, this one deals primarily with the themes of privacy and distance, particularly distance between family members. It isn't so much that people WANT to keep secrets, as that it seems not to occur to them to share their feelings or to discuss their lives.
As usual, also, Tóibín writing is perceptive and thoughtful. His descriptions of Eilis' seasickness on the journey over and her homesickness are unerring. Here he is on homesickness: "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. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought."
Though this is not my favorite of Tóibín's books, I would certainly recommend it. (A not-great book of Tóibín's is better than most writers' best.)