Colm Toibin's Long Island.Supplied
- Title: Long Island
- Author: Colm Toibin
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
- Pages: 304
There’s nothing new about a novel opening with a stranger arriving at the doorstep. As a hook, it works time and again. Maybe it’s because there’s something inherently mysterious about it, at least for a moment, and readers love a good mystery. Or else because we relate to the dominoes-falling quality of the story that tends to follow: someone arrives, something happens, all hell breaks loose.
In his latest book, Long Island, Irish novelist Colm Toibin adopts a familiar opening, appends it to the well-trodden ground of complicated relationships and competing desires, and creates a brilliant, compelling and utterly human story that begs to be read and reflected upon as the reader questions, judges and perhaps even curses the choices of his characters.
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Set in the 1970s, decades after the events of Brooklyn, the sequel Long Island is a book about what happens next. This next chapter in the story of an Irish woman, Eilis Lacey, is at once an immigrant tale and a coming-of-age story.
This time it’s not just Eilis – now older, married and in crisis – but also her children whose story we follow as their present and future are bound up in the actions of the adults in their lives, of decisions and non-decisions over which they have little to no control to shape them.
Familiar characters from Brooklyn return, leading with Eilis, but also her husband, Tony. As the story moves from Long Island, N.Y. – where happy-ever-after is ultimately elusive – and back to Ireland, Eilis’s friends and family and her erstwhile semi-requited love, Jim Farrell, appear, forcing Eilis to assess her future and to struggle over what she wants and with whom she wants it.
The stranger who opens the novel sets a series of events in motion. A man arrives at Eilis’s door to tell her Tony, a plumber, has cheated on her while on a job “fixing leaks.” Now the man’s wife is pregnant with Tony’s child.
Eilis and Tony live beside the latter’s parents and near his two brothers and their families. Soon, Tony’s mother hatches a plan to raise the child, which the stranger threatens to deposit on Eilis’s doorstep upon its birth. Eilis refuses to have anything to do with the child and soon leaves for Ireland, with the children to follow some time later, in search of time and distance from Tony and his ever-present family.
Later in the novel, Eilis is in Ireland and has fled the town in search of a place and moment to herself. But even there, the family looms large. Back in the United States, her family “came in and out of her presence all day,” she reflects. “It did not strike her until now than even when she was alone they were in the shadows close to her. They were still close to her here.”
One of Toibin’s great skills as a novelist is his capacity to build several interlocking themes into a story that feels like it could happen to just about anyone. Long Island is at once about freedom, a longing for it and its costs, and the eventual responsibility that conditions and limits it. This decades-later sequel is a natural and fitting second act after Brooklyn, in which the protagonists face the era-bound constraints of 1950s Ireland and America, but not yet the more timeless constraints of growing up.
Related to the themes of freedom and responsibility, Toibin touches on the Nietzschean insight that “by doing we forego,” which the 19th-century German philosopher warned could lead to a life-limiting paralysis as we became caught between our choices, their consequences and their foreclosures. Near to each rests the decision not to choose – itself a choice to let life happen to you as it will, a course of action that looms large for Eilis and others.
In Long Island, more than one of the characters tries to avoid this Nietzschean paradox by trying to have it more ways than one – to escape being caught between two loves or locations or lives – which is to say, more than one of them is unfaithful to their partners and left wondering where they ought to be, physically and emotionally. Indeed, quite a few are found stuck at a fork in the road. Eilis is once more torn between Tony and Jim, just as Jim is soon torn between Eilis and Nancy, Eilis’s old friend, whom he has started seeing. Meanwhile, whether Eilis ought to be in Ireland or the U.S. is an ever-present question.
A novelist has done their job if their readers find themselves at once sympathizing and judging the characters, reviewing their choices and wondering if they’d been in the same time and place and situation they’d have chosen better – or at least more easily. In Long Island, Toibin succeeds at writing characters who live real lives, human lives, our lives and a story that transcends Brooklyn, Long Island, Ireland and decades.