Long Island

The Unexpected Visitor

Eilis Lacey — née Fanning, now Eilis Fiorello — is living in Long Island with her husband Tony, their teenage children, and the texture of an Irish-American life that she has made work. She is not unhappy. But there is a quality of accommodation in her contentment, a sense of life as something inhabited rather than fully chosen, that has been present since Brooklyn and that Colm Tóibín has always understood about her.

Long Island begins when an Italian woman appears at the Fiorellos’ door with information about Tony — information that concerns a pregnancy, a woman he has been seeing, and an intention to resolve the situation that will require Eilis’s cooperation or at least her knowledge. The scene is brief, conducted in the yard, with the emotional register that Tóibín specialises in: things not said being more important than what is said, the social mechanics of the encounter doing as much work as its content.

The Thirty-Year Gap

Tóibín published Brooklyn in 2009. The fifteen years between that novel and Long Island are not simply a publishing gap; they have become part of the sequel’s meaning. Readers who loved Brooklyn have had time to grow older, to make choices that foreclosed other choices, to understand from the inside what Eilis’s situation in the original novel meant. The sequel meets those readers at a different moment in their lives.

Eilis, too, has had thirty years. She married Tony. They built a life. Her children are the age she was when she first left Ireland. She has not returned to Enniscorthy since the events of Brooklyn, and the reasons for this — which involve Jim Farrell, the man she was becoming attached to when Tony’s existence became known — have settled into the texture of a life she does not examine closely.

Long Island’s plot forces an examination. With Tony’s infidelity made known, with the Italian woman’s demands creating a crisis that Eilis cannot quietly absorb, she returns to Ireland for the summer. This is the novel’s centrepiece: the return to Enniscorthy, to her mother, to the town that shaped her, to the version of herself that existed before America.

Tóibín’s Prose

Tóibín is one of the most formally controlled writers in contemporary fiction. His prose does not call attention to itself — there are no striking images, no memorable sentences in the conventional sense — but it is doing constant precise work: managing the reader’s emotional relationship to Eilis, delivering information at exactly the speed that maximises its effect, maintaining a quality of restraint that makes the moments of feeling more powerful for being deferred.

The restraint is the novel’s primary technical achievement and its primary emotional risk. Tóibín withholds so consistently — Eilis’s feelings are present but not named, the emotional charges of scenes are communicated obliquely rather than directly — that readers must work to receive what the novel is offering. The work is worth it. The emotional impact of the novel’s most significant scenes is precisely a function of how much has been held in reserve.

The Return to Ireland

The Irish material is the novel’s most fully realised section. Enniscorthy is rendered with the specificity of a writer who grew up there — not picturesque, not romantic, but a particular kind of Irish provincial town with its particular social hierarchies and its particular forms of watching and being watched.

Eilis’s mother, her friends, the structure of the town’s social life — all of this is familiar from Brooklyn, but thirty years on and seen through Eilis’s more weathered eyes. The question of what she feels for Jim Farrell — whether it is love, or the ghost of love, or the longing for the person she might have been — is present throughout these sections without ever being resolved into a declaration.

What the Novel Is About

Long Island is, most essentially, about obligation — the specific web of obligations that marriage creates and that persist even when desire has changed, even when the person you married has done something that would seem to release you from those obligations. Eilis is not a person who easily escapes obligation. It is not in her character, and it is not what her formation — Irish Catholic, female, working-class — has equipped her to do.

The novel examines what it means to live within obligation rather than transcending it: not the triumph of duty over desire that melodrama would make of it, not the liberation of desire over duty that a different kind of novel might supply, but the more honest territory between them where most people actually live.

The ending is characteristically Tóibínian: something has shifted, something has been chosen, but the full meaning of the choice is held in reserve. The restraint, after 320 pages, feels exactly right.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A worthy sequel that stands fully alongside Brooklyn. Tóibín’s most emotionally precise work.