Silence and secrets permeate an immigrant enclave in Colm Tóibín’s ‘Long Island’: NPR

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

It’s FRESH AIR. Novelist Colm Toibin said he always had a feeling he would return to the heroine’s story from his 2009 novel, “Brooklyn.” Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says she’s glad Toibin followed her instincts. Here’s his review of “Long Island,” the sequel to “Brooklyn.”

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: The outer boroughs of New York all the way to Long Island. This was the path of exodus for many mostly white, working- and middle-class New Yorkers in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the city was seen as in decline. . So it makes historical sense that Colm Toibin’s follow-up to his 2009 bestseller, “Brooklyn,” is called “Long Island.” Where might Toibin’s heroine, Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant who married Italian-American plumber Tony Fiorello, end up? But as anyone who’s read “Brooklyn” or seen the 2015 film starring Saoirse Ronan knows, Eilis is a restless soul. The opening shock of the second page of “Long Island” is that laid-back Tony, her husband of now 20 years, becomes agitated himself.

Before we go any further, a quick word about sequels: I don’t generally review them because not everyone has read the first book or seen the movie. But in this case, it would be worth catching up. “Long Island,” along with “Brooklyn,” is a devastating diptych about a woman, in two different seasons of her life, struggling against the constraints of fate. Toibin, whose novels enlivened Greek myths as well as the subtle minds of masters and magicians like Henry James and Thomas Mann, also invests even these routine lives with tragic dignity.

“Long Island” begins in 1976, when a strange man appears at Eilis’ door and bluntly announces that Tony has impregnated his wife. The monotonous stasis of Eilis’s suburban world breaks, as if Zeus himself had struck the house with a thunderbolt. The man also informs Eilis that when the baby is born, it will be dropped off at her door. What ensues for the remainder of the first part of this novel is a fraught pantomime of silence and secrets. Eilis and Tony’s house is on a cul-de-sac, where all the other houses are filled with Tony’s extended family: his parents, two of his brothers, their wives, and many children. The enclave of Fiorello, which Eilis considers the great family network, is as vigilant and stifling as the town of Enniscorthy in Ireland, where Eilis grew up. When she learns that she is one of the last family members to discover Tony’s infidelity and that her mother-in-law, who lives next door, has already agreed to adopt the baby, Eilis realizes that she has no one to turn to. If she told someone, Eilis thinks, then maybe she would know how she feels and what she should do.

She had never confided in her mother, who was also in Ireland, without a telephone at home. Her two sisters-in-law, Lena and Clara, were both from Italian families and close to each other, but not to Eilis. Since the situation at home is unbearable, Eilis decides to visit her 80-year-old mother in Ireland, a place she has not returned to in almost two decades, and for good reason. There she will discover, just like another Long Islander named Jay Gatsby, that the past cannot be repeated. Toibin floats with ease between periods in the space of a sentence, but it is Toibin’s omissions and restraint, the words he does not write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working world, Catholic and pre-therapeutic where people never talk directly about anything, especially your feelings.

This is the conclusion of a scene where Eilis and her mother-in-law, Francesca, were sitting in Eilis’s kitchen, having a hesitant, evasive, non-conversational conversation about the baby. (Reading) Francesca stood up and waited for Eilis to get up and accompany her. But Eilis remained seated. Francesca left the room and walked alone towards the front door. As her mother-in-law was very particular about form, Eilis knew that this studied insult would not be forgotten. It would create a chasm between them that wouldn’t be easily bridged, and it would give Eilis the satisfaction that something had at least been accomplished.

There are no innocents in Toibin’s world. Every character has at least a slight trace of villainy in them. Indeed, the bitter pleasure of the Ireland section, which makes up the bulk of the novel, lies in seeing how characters Eilis underestimated years before exact their own long-delayed retribution – silently, of course . No one in the world would ever dare to say a word.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Colm Toibin’s “Long Island.” If you want to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like this week’s interviews with Brittney Griner about her imprisonment in Russia and returning to her wife and WNBA team, check out our podcast. You will find many FRESH AIR interviews there. And to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes of our show and get staff recommendations, subscribe to our free newsletter at Whyy.org/freshair.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Susan Nyakundi and Joel Wolfram. Our Digital Media Producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner produced today’s show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. My name is Terry Gross.

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