Brooklyn

The Leaving

Eilis Lacey does not particularly want to leave Enniscorthy. Her sister Rose has arranged it — there are no opportunities in Ireland, and a priest from Brooklyn has offered to find her a position in a department store. She goes because there is no reason not to, because Rose has gone to the trouble, because a life of good reasons for staying is not the same thing as a life.

Brooklyn in 1952 is another world: the boarding house run by Mrs Kehoe, the Bartocci department store with its basement full of Brooklyn Italians shopping for Christmas, the evening classes at Brooklyn College, and eventually Tony Fiorello — a plumber, a Dodgers fan, a man who falls in love with her with Italian straightforwardness and waits for her to fall in love with him back.

She does. She is happy. She goes home to Ireland for a family funeral and discovers that the life she might have had is still there, waiting. A man in Enniscorthy has noticed her. Her mother needs her. Ireland has not changed but she has.

The Choice

Tóibín constructs the novel so that both options — Brooklyn and Tony, or Enniscorthy and the life she might still claim — are equally valid and equally costly. He does not load the deck. What he does instead is show, with extraordinary precision, how a person becomes committed to a life: not through grand decisions but through the accumulation of small acts, small happinesses, small obligations.

The final pages are as devastating as any in recent literary fiction, and they are achieved entirely through restraint.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — Perfectly written, quietly devastating, and one of the finest accounts of immigration and identity in contemporary fiction.

The Texture of Emigration

What makes Brooklyn (2009) more than a period emigration story is Tóibín’s attention to the precise mechanics of how a person becomes attached to a life. Eilis Lacey does not leave Enniscorthy out of hunger or persecution; she leaves because her sister Rose has arranged it, because a Brooklyn priest can find her work, because there is no compelling reason to stay and staying for no reason is not the same as living. That muted motivation is the novel’s first quiet truth: many of the most consequential journeys are undertaken without conviction, and become irreversible only in retrospect. Tóibín follows Eilis through seasickness, homesickness, and the slow construction of a new self with a patience that makes the ordinary stages of adjustment feel momentous.

The Two Worlds

The Brooklyn Eilis enters is rendered with sharp specificity — Mrs Kehoe’s boarding house and its competitive female society, the Bartocci department store with its basement of Italian shoppers, the evening bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College, and finally Tony Fiorello, the plumber and Dodgers fan who falls in love with her with an Italian directness and waits for her to love him back. The Irish sections are deliberately paler, and some readers register this as a weakness; it is better understood as a method. Ireland has not changed in Eilis’s absence, but she has, and Tóibín shows her homecoming as the disorienting experience of a transformed person returning to an unchanged place. The man in Enniscorthy who suddenly notices her, the mother who needs her, the life she might still claim — all of it is real, and all of it is now slightly out of focus, because Eilis is no longer quite the person it was built for.

The Unloadable Choice

The novel’s structural achievement is that it refuses to load the dice. Brooklyn and Tony, or Enniscorthy and the life she might reclaim — both options are made equally valid and equally costly, and Tóibín declines to tell us which is right. He is interested instead in how commitment actually forms: not through grand decisions but through the accumulation of small acts, small happinesses, small obligations that, almost without our noticing, become the shape of a life. By the time Eilis must choose, she has already made commitments in both directions, and the choice is therefore not a matter of logic but of which person she is willing to become.

Restraint as Force

The famous restraint of Tóibín’s prose is not coldness but a deliberate strategy of accumulation. Emotion gathers in the spaces between his plain sentences, in what is observed but not stated, so that the final pages — among the most quietly devastating in recent literary fiction — land with a force that no amount of explicit feeling could have produced. The 2015 film adaptation with Saoirse Ronan is excellent and faithful to the novel’s spirit, but the book reaches places the film cannot, because so much of its power lives in interiority that the camera can only approximate. Brooklyn is, finally, a novel about the cost of self-creation: the discovery that to make a life in a new place is also to make a person who can no longer fully belong to the old one.

The Weight of the Ordinary

Part of what makes Brooklyn so quietly affecting is Tóibín’s refusal to manufacture drama where life offers none. Eilis’s days are filled with shop counters and ledgers, dance halls and letters from home, the small negotiations of a boarding house run by the watchful Mrs Kehoe. Nothing in the early chapters announces itself as momentous, and yet Tóibín makes each of these ordinary increments feel like the slow setting of cement around a life. By declining the easy intensities of the immigrant-saga genre — the dramatic privations, the sudden reversals — he locates the real drama where it actually lives: in the almost imperceptible process by which a person stops being a visitor and starts being a resident, until the question of where home is can no longer be answered cleanly. It is this fidelity to the texture of unremarkable experience that gives the novel’s final, wrenching choice its full weight.

Reading Guides

• The Master by Colm Tóibín — Full Review
• Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín — Full Review