Brooklyn

Colm Toibin

MacMillan

Otago Daily Times, September 5th 2009

Colm Toibin’s latest novel, Brooklyn will resonate with all who have lived and worked abroad.  Growing up in the small Irish town of Enniscorthy, Eilis Lacey assumes she will spend her life there, “knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbours, the same routines in the same streets”.  Her older sister, Rose, has greater aspirations for her, however, and arranges a job for her in Brooklyn, New York. Adjusting to this new life is a slow and painful process for Eilis, every moment bringing some new revelation, another detail to pour out in a letter home. 

Over time, however, the connection home becomes increasingly tenuous, some aspects of her life impossible to share, and this disjunction is accentuated when a family tragedy calls her back to Enniscorthy.  Seduced by the rediscovered familiarity of home, America begins to lose its substance just as Ireland drifted away during her years abroad.  When Eilis realises these two worlds cannot be reconciled, she is forced to choose between them.

If this potted plot summary feels a little stilted, it is because it is difficult to do the book justice in review.  Toibin writes with such clarity and focus that Brooklyn reads more like a short story than a novel, a book to be experienced in all its immediacy rather than described in second-hand words. I was captivated by this fragment of a life, a moment extending beyond the page and leaving a vivid impression in its wake.