Colm Tóibín never liked sequels and never thought he should write one, he told NPR recently. So, the ending of his 2009 blockbuster novel, Brooklyn, should have been final. Except, now Tóibín has returned with an update to the story in the form of Long Island.
At the end of Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey, the young Irish immigrant from Enniscorthy, torn between new country and old, American husband and Irish suitor, returned to New York. Tóibín’s sixth novel, later turned into an exquisite Oscar-nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan, sharply and movingly examined the 1950s’ migrant experience. It was also, at its heart, a love story, a marriage plot in disguise. By the end, Eilis chose Tony Fiorello, her Italian-origin husband based in America, despite the pull of Jim Farrell, a love interest kindled on a long sabbatical back home in Ireland.
Long Island
Pan Macmillan
Pages: 304
Price: Rs.750
The danger of revisiting a much-loved novel is obvious: burden the characters with a future they were never designed to inhabit and foreclose our sense of their possibilities.
I embarked upon Long Island with both trepidation and curiosity; would Tóibín ruin a perfectly good thing, or did he have some more tricks yet? It is both a relief and a pleasure to report that he has pulled off a magical double act: Long Island is assured, tender, and a total triumph. It takes the old story and characters in new and rewarding directions, in ways that feel both surprising and still authentic.
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Two decades have passed, and Eilis is now a homeowner and wife, an American resident nestled in the titular New York suburb. She has two children with the plumber Tony and a bevy of boisterous Italian in-laws who live next-door. Long Island opens with a propulsive curveball, and by page two we are in the heart of the crisis.
In Long Island, Tóibín delicately captures the dislocation of the returning emigree and the adjustment to rhythms of the old country. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
A mysterious, and somewhat aggressive, Irishman knocks on Eilis’ door and tells her: “he is good at his job, your husband”, “his plumbing is so good that [my wife] is to have a baby in August”. Eilis barely has time to masticate this news of her husband’s perfidy when the stranger informs her that he plans to drop off “this little bastard” at their doorstep. Eilis is gobsmacked: she “wanted to ask him what part of Ireland he was from as a way of ignoring what he had said”.
If we rooted for the earnest, lovelorn Tony in the previous novel, his deceit makes him less likeable now. He refuses to give Eilis any assurance that he will turf out his illegitimate child, should the alleged cuckold carry out his promise. One stilted confrontation uncovers the affair in passing, but for the most part, Eilis chooses to digest the news alone. Instead of fight, she kicks into flight mode; she plans a trip to Ireland, ostensibly for her mother’s 80th birthday but really a kind of self-exile, as she tacitly gives Tony time to deal with the problem. Will she return? Will her marriage survive? She is not sure. It all depends on the choices Tony makes.
Long Island gives us a grown-up Eilis; a mother, a wronged woman, a suffocated daughter-in-law and daughter. If Brooklyn buffeted her by the force of circumstance, this novel gives the middle-aged heroine greater agency.
Web of feelings
The bulk of the action is centred in Enniscorthy, where Eilis, returning after several years, cuts a distinct, fashionable figure (“She seemed like a different person. Something had happened to her in America”, one character thinks). Tóibín delicately captures the dislocation of the returning emigree and the adjustment to rhythms of the old country. If homesickness was the top note in Brooklyn, now we see how the homecoming unspools. Eilis glimpses versions of her old self, and what-ifs and could-have-beens linger portentously.
In the Tóibín multiverse, characters cross-pollinate novels across his oeuvre. Lily Devereux of The Blackwater Lightship (1999) has a fleeting, if loaded, mention here as does the widow Nora Webster, who had a titular turn in his 2014 novel. Nancy Sheridan previously appeared in a short story called “The Name of the Game” as also in Brooklyn.
Neither the town nor Eilis knows this, but her old flame, Jim, is seeing her old friend, Nancy. The animating tension is how Eilis and Jim will meet, as they inevitably must, all those years after she broke his heart, and what new complications might ensue from here on.
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Unlike Brooklyn, which glided along from Eilis’ perspective, here we are privy to three different points of view. For the first time, we understand how Jim processed the heartbreak two decades ago and his complicated web of feelings now (“he really wanted to ask if she had thought about him much over the years and if she had ever regretted not staying”). Nancy, a widow and small business owner, has her own minefields to navigate, of which Jim is just a piece. Like Brooklyn, the geometry of this novel, too, is a love triangle. Tony, back in Long Island, has been relegated to the shadows.
The writing is as always unpretentious, unshowy. Tóibín is a master of making much happen from very little action. And he is best when he is observing intimate moments, the textures of everyday interactions and private thoughts. These suppressions and secrets swirl in an atmosphere of small-town gossip and minor revelations. How will the two contradictory narrative impulses eventually collide?
Action escalates at the end, and the denouement may feel slightly underwhelming. But Tóibín has managed to do that difficult thing: give us a sequel with heart and soul and magic.
Bhavya Dore is a freelance journalist who writes for various Indian and international publications.
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