Brooklyn: A Novel
by Colm Toibin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Colm ToibinEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-05-05
ISBN: 1439138311
Number of pages: 262
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of Brooklyn: A Novel
Book Review: "She was nobody here...Nothing here was part of her...It was as though she had been locked away."
Summary: 4 Stars
Colm Toibin, long recognized for his sensitive character studies, adds to his list of fine accomplishments with this memorable study of young Eilis Lacey, on her own in New York while the remainder of her family stays behind in Enniscorthy, County Wexford. It is less than a decade after World War II, jobs are hard to come by, and the economy in Ireland is a disaster. When Father Flood, an Irish priest with a parish in Brooklyn, returns home for a brief vacation, he suggests that he can find Eilis a good job. Though Eilis is woefully unprepared for the cultural changes that she will face, she decides to leave the familiarity of home for a new world. "Parts of Brooklyn are just like Ireland. They're full of Irish," she is told.
Focusing on the minutiae of life, which is Eilis's own focus, Toibin recreates her passage across a stormy Atlantic, her introduction to life in a Brooklyn boarding house, with its assortment of characters, and her experience as a saleswoman at a department store in the ethnically changing Brooklyn neighborhood where she lives. She sometimes attends Saturday dances at the local parish hall, and she attends night school, studying to become a bookkeeper/accountant. It is certainly not an exciting life, and it is not an exciting plot, yet Toibin recreates Eilis's feelings within these scenes so minutely and chooses his descriptive details so carefully, that her life becomes a delicate drama, a life filled with universal themes "writ small."
As she faces the challenges of her new life in Brooklyn,we see her as immature, naïve, and touchingly anxious to please. Sometimes timid, she is also, on occasion, almost impossibly righteous. Despite her firm grounding in her Catholic faith, however, she is surprisingly enigmatic and vacillating--reluctant to take chances--and she can try the patience of her reader as much as she does some of the characters in the novel. Through his simple and straightforward language and imagery, however, Toibin allows us to share Eilis's inner life, and we come to know her on an emotional level. Immature and "unformed" as she may be, she is understandable and comes alive. When she meets Tony, "innocent, eager and shiny," at a parish dance, it appears to be an ideal romance.
A trip home leads to the climax, in which Eilis, like so many other emigrants before her, must confront how much she may have changed, if at all, as a result of her experience in another world and what she sees as her future. Readers may argue about the "rightness" of the conclusion, the realism or its lack in Part IV, and the extent to which the author relies on coincidence to resolve the action, but in his characterization of an often conflicted main character (and in the vibrant supporting characters), Toibin has created a memorable novel which proves that a character "drama" like this need not always be shocking in order to be "dramatic." n Mary Whipple
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