Long Island

Colm Tóibín

Pan MacMillan

Otago Daily Times, 2024

Richly evocative and an unashamed evocation of small-town Irish life, Long Island, Colm Tóibín’s long-awaited sequel to 2009’s Brooklyn, is a delight.

The novel opens in the spring of 1976, more than twenty years after Eilis Lacey left the Irish village of Enniscorthy in search of a better life. By most counts, her life in New York would be considered a success: her husband, Tony Fiorello, is a successful tradesman, and the entire extended Italian-American family lives together in a four-house cul-de-sac in southern Long Island. She even has a degree of independence, with a job of her own managing accounts for a local businessman. Her happiness is shattered, however, when a stranger calls to inform her that his wife is carrying Tony’s child, which he intends to leave at their doorstep when it is born. A furious Eilis vows the baby will never cross the threshold, and when she learns that Tony and his mother have other plans, she books a flight to Enniscorthy, unsure when or whether she will return.

Any sense of relief she anticipates on returning home evaporates, however, when it becomes apparent Enniscorthy has a place for her neither figuratively nor literally: Not only do her stylish clothes and years abroad mark her as an outsider, her brother has purchased the family home from their mother, who tartly informs her “[not to] expect a share of this house when I pass on to my reward”. 

Additional complications arise in the shape of Jim Farrell, the man whose heart Eilis broke in Brooklyn. It has taken many years, but Jim has finally found companionship with Eilis’s childhood friend, Nancy. Their relationship may not have the passion of first love – Nancy lost her husband while still in her twenties – but it is a mutually satisfying arrangement. And although their engagement is not yet public, Nancy is already making plans for their future. But Eilis’s sudden reappearance leaves Jim confronted with the same choice she faced two decades earlier – whether to honour his promises or follow his heart. 

The narrative passes back and forth between Jim, Eilis, and Nancy, each of whom withholds key information from the others. They are inherently likeable and sympathetic characters despite their faults, and I desperately wanted all three to find happiness, despite knowing this to be impossible. I loved the parallels between Eilis’s mother and mother-in-law, each of whom exercises matriarchal autonomy in a consummate – and contrasting – manner. And, as someone who grew up in a small town in the 70s, the way everybody in Enniscorthy knows the most intimate details of one another’s lives was (un)comfortably familiar. 

Although easily read as a stand-alone novel, appreciation of Long Island is enhanced by recognising how the plot reprises and inverts that of Brooklyn. The open-ended conclusion sees Jim awaiting a knock that may or may not come. I sincerely hope we will one day discover whether it does.