Just Read: Colm Toibin's Brooklyn

from London Review of Books
by Ruth Scurr

Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín’s most beautifully executed novel to date. Like The Heather Blazing (1992) it is an intimate portrait of a sad life, built up steadily from simple descriptive sentences, laid down with precision at a controlled pace. Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect.
Beginning in Enniscorthy in the south-east of Ireland in the early 1950s, Brooklyn centres on the young adulthood of Eilis Lacey, who lives with her mother and elder sister Rose, after their father’s death and three brothers’ departure to England in search of work. There are no prospects for Eilis in the town. She studies bookkeeping and longs for a good clerical post and smarter clothes like Rose’s, but the best on offer is a Sunday job in Miss Kelly’s grocery shop:
"Miss Kelly stood back, her attention divided between the door and Eilis. She checked every price Eilis wrote down, informed her briskly of the price when she could not remember, and wrote down and added up the figures herself after Eilis had done so, not letting her give the customer the change until she had also been shown the original payment. As well as doing this, she greeted certain customers by name, motioning them forward and insisting that Eilis break off whatever she was doing to serve them."
Eilis’s escape comes in the form of another job offer: this time on the other side of the Atlantic. Father Flood, back visiting his hometown after emigrating to the United States, is shocked to discover a young woman of Eilis’s potential crabbed inside Miss Kelly’s corner shop, so promises to find her work and lodgings in Brooklyn. “Parts of Brooklyn are just like Ireland. They’re full of Irish”, he reassures Eilis’s mother. “It might be very dangerous”, she replies, eyes fixed on the floor. “Not in my parish”, Father Flood continues, “It’s full of lovely people. A lot of life centres round the parish, even more than in Ireland. And there’s work for anyone who’s willing to work.”

Eilis’s journey to America is one of cumulative grief. First she goes to Liverpool where her brother closest in age meets her and takes her for a good meal, in case the food on the boat is “not to her liking”. She does not know whether or not to embrace her brother, they have never embraced before. She hugs him and he blushes, saying, “That’s enough of that now”. Jack works at a warehouse for spare car parts. She asks if he sees their other brothers, Pat and Martin, much. He tells her it’s a pity she’s not going with them to Birmingham, “there’d be a stampede for you on a Saturday night”.
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This stilted exchange of sibling attachment gathers its full poignancy in retrospect, after Eilis boards the ship to New York, to find herself utterly alone among passengers selfish enough to lock a seasick person out of the lavatory. After a harrowing journey, she arrives in Mrs Kehoe’s Brooklyn boarding house, where she will live alongside a Miss McAdam from Belfast, Patty McGuire (born in upstate New York) and Diana Montini, whose mother was Irish.

These loose connections of provenance only serve to illuminate the home Eilis has lost:

"She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything . . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday."

Tóibín does not write about the supernatural: the ghostly in his novels is an all-too-human projection of psychological distress. Grief especially evokes the space ghosts would inhabit if only it were possible to believe in them. There is a memorable example of his use of this device in his novel about Henry James, The Master (2004). James has returned to Venice after the death, and probable suicide, of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson. He goes out in a gondola to dispose of her clothes in the lagoon. The clothes of the deceased are laid reverentially on the water as though on a bed, they darken, then disappear, but suddenly:

"In the gathering dusk it appeared as though a seal or some dark, rounded object from the deep had appeared on the surface of the water . . . . And then Henry saw what it was. Some of the dresses had floated to the surface again like black balloons, evidence of the strange sea burial they had just enacted, their arms and bellies bloated with water."

In Brooklyn, Eilis is young and vital enough to move beyond the experience of black despair to find friendship, even love, in her new life. She works at a fictional version of the famous Abrahams & Straus department store on Fulton Street. Clothes are the centre of her working life, a subject of intense discussion among her fellow lodgers, and, most importantly, a reminder of her sister Rose, whose poise and elegance used always to seem beyond Eilis. On the voyage out, Eilis is struck suddenly by the inappropriateness of her going to America instead of Rose; then, in a moment of awed horror, she realizes the extent of her sister’s sacrifice: someone has to stay at home, and Rose wanted Eilis to be free.

Brooklyn stands comparison with Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Both books share a preoccupation with the conflict between personal freedom and responsibility, or duty. They both evoke feminine sexual inhibition, or fear. Despite her brother's reassurance, Eilis is a young woman with no confidence or understanding of her own sexual allure. She attends dances at home and in Brooklyn and feels like an awkward wallflower, always thinking of an excuse to leave early. When she finds a boyfriend in Brooklyn, she doesn’t know how to slow him down and explain that marriage and children are not necessarily what she wants; she doesn’t really know what she wants, but is too polite, too well schooled in the habits of kindness and embarrassed repression, to say so outright.

Eilis’s social position is far more modest than Isabel Archer’s: Tóibín’s portrait is of a 1950s shop girl, rather than a nineteenth-century heiress. But both writers are concerned with describing in intimate and intricate detail the emotional content of a young feminine life that leads to a stark, distressing, dead end. In explaining Isabel Archer’s epiphany about her marriage, James writes It was not her fault – she had practiced no deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and where it served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Isabel Archer’s prison is constructed by the Machiavellian motives of her sophisticated acquaintance. Eilis Lacey’s is rather the result of inherited social expectation, combined with bad luck and failure of nerve. She might have been free, she might have reached those high places of happiness – that certainly was her sister Rose’s intention – but instead she finds her life trapped on a course she has not really chosen; her only comfort to close her eyes and try “to imagine nothing more”.

With Brooklyn, Tóibín has transcended the homage he paid to James in The Master. He has returned to the themes of melancholy and grief that ran like dark threads through his earlier novels, especially The Blackwater Lightship (2000). Homesickness and rupture are the seminal experiences of Eilis’s life. The fact that what she is missing so much, even to the point of illness, is so painfully limited, only increases the pathos of her loss. Tóibín, more like Hardy than James in this respect, knows what it means to want something modest and simple at the centre of your life, but not be able to have it. Whether it is another person, society or fate, that is responsible for the deprivation, scarcely matters. There is in fact too much sorrow in the world, and Tóibín, better than any of his contemporaries, knows how to capture its timbre in fiction.



Colm Tóibín
BROOKLYN
252pp. Viking. £17.99.
978 0 670 91812 6



Ruth Scurr is Fellow and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is the author of Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, 2006.