In Colm Tóibín's "Long Island," Eilis Lacey Grows Up
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Long Island, the newly-published follow-up to Colm Tóibín’s most beloved novel, Brooklyn, takes place around twenty years after the first novel and begins with a crisis. Tony, the charming Italian boy Eilis Lacey married in Brooklyn, is now a grown man working as a plumber and, as Eilis discovers, having an affair with one of his clients, who is now pregnant. That woman’s husband comes to Eilis’ door and tells her he won’t take care of the baby once it is born but instead plans to bring it to their house. Eilis’ situation is further complicated by the fact that she and Tony live in a small suburban enclave with Tony’s brothers, their families, and his parents. Eilis is outnumbered by an Italian American clan who prioritize its sons above their wives, especially Eilis, who as an Irishwoman remains an interloper despite all the years she has been married to him.
Already, some readers (including on the New York Times Book Review podcast) have wondered at Tóibín throwing a wrench a story that, they say, resolved so satisfactorily in Brooklyn. In that novel, Eilis immigrates to Brooklyn, meets and marries Tony, and eventually returns home to Ireland to visit her mother. There, she embarks on a tentative romance with another man, Jim Farrell, without telling anyone that she is already married. Eventually, she decides to return to Tony and her life in Brooklyn. In the film adaptation, directed by John Crowley and starring Saoirse Ronan, this resolution is undeniably the correct and satisfying end to the tale; she and Tony have a romantic cinematic reunion over sweeping music to close out the movie. The book, though, ends with Eilis slipping out of her mother’s house, leaving a note for Jim, and imagining herself fading out of his memory as her life solidifies in Brooklyn. It is not an unhappy ending but an ambivalent one, the product of a choice that Eilis must make between two worlds that cannot be reconciled. Like all immigrants, she cannot continue to live abroad and at home simultaneously, a problem here dramatized through the choice between two men.
Long Island is a natural progression of this complex situation, rather than a perversion of a happy ending. It also draws on different novelistic influences. While Tóibín explained at the time that Brooklyn was heavily inspired by Jane Austen, a novelist for whom books end with weddings, Long Island owes a greater debt to the Victorians, who problematized the marriage plot.
Brooklyn’s debts to Austen are manifold, including its linear narrative (there are no flashbacks, not a technique Austen uses either), its avoidance of descriptions of faces, and the presence of certain secondary characters, who evoke character types from Austen (most notably, the crotchety and overbearing boarding house mistress from whom Eilis rents a room). It also follows the basic shape of a romance, though the wedding does not quite end the novel — Ireland and Jim Farrell get in the way of this. Still, as described above, by the end of the book, Eilis has made her choice to commit to Tony, as if reassuring us that she won’t deviate from the Austenian marriage plot Tóibín has devised.
Marriage and relationships in Long Island are more complicated. In his New York Times Book Review podcast interview, Tóibín mentioned Edith Wharton and The Age of Innocence as an inspiration, along with his long-time influence Henry James (about whom he wrote a novel, The Master, in 2004). James liked to conjure scenarios in which conflicts were not handled directly, sometimes to the point of absurdity in his later novels, where characters often speak in opaque dialogue that can be hard for readers to decipher. And while people still cheating and mislead potential romantic partners, as characters do in both Brooklyn and Long Island, the stakes of this kind of deception were much higher in the nineteenth century novel, when marriage and the social respectability it conferred were of paramount importance to women. Divorce was impossible for most women at this time, and women found to be cheating on their husbands, or living with men to whom they were not married, were exiled from polite society. (George Eliot, who made the decision to live with the writer George Henry Lewes, who was estranged from his wife [who was involved with another man and had children by him] but could not get a divorce, was forced to give up most of her social contacts for many years, even as she became an acclaimed novelist.)
Many of Tóibín’s stylistic choices in Long Island evoke Henry James: after finding out about Tony’s baby, for instance, Eilis obstinately refuses to negotiate with her mother-in-law, or Tony’s other relatives, about what to do about Tony’s impending child. This portion of the book, in which conversations are repeated to no avail, and Eilis continues to refuse to capitulate or acknowledge the indirect questions and demands of her mother-in-law, is so absurd it can be funny at times; it is also very stressful to watch Eilis, now older and more canny than she was in Brooklyn, try to navigate this problem with seemingly no solution. The majority of the novel, though, takes place in Ireland, where Eilis has traveled to visit her mother and leave Tony’s family to deal with the question of the baby. This portion of the book is dedicated to Eilis’ relationship with Jim Farrell, whom she abandoned in Ireland twenty years earlier, his quiet engagement to her old friend Nancy, and the looming question of what Eilis will do about her own marriage when she returns to New York.
In nineteenth century novels, the problem of the secret relationship, the double-dealing man, and the unhappy marriage are examined again and again. In Austen, this usually manifests as a rake — Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, or Frank Churchill in Emma — who plays at pursuing one women while secretly pursuing, or beholden to, another. While Austen’s central heroines always escape these men, marriage problems become more complex in the century’s later novels. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, in one example of many, is trapped in an unhappy marriage with a man who forbids her from remarrying the man she really loves, at penalty of losing her inheritance, invoking potential social censure and putting her financial future at risk. But The Age of Innocence (written in 1920, but set in the 1870s) is the most obvious reference point for Long Island. In that novel, Newland Archer falls in love with Countess Ellen Olenska, who has fled her abusive husband in Europe and returned to her hometown of New York. Newland is tempted to marry her despite the fact that this would require her to divorce — something that, in their elite society, would be a major scandal — and the even more pressing fact that he is already engaged to her much more conventional cousin. Eventually, he does marry that cousin, fulfilling his social obligations, but dooming himself to an unrealized life.
Jim’s engagement to Nancy, kept secret because of her daughter’s impending nuptials, is less glamorous than Archer’s engagement to the daughter of a wealthy New York family; he owns a pub, she a chip stand. But as a widow, frustrated by the toil of running a business and raising her children alone, she places an immense weight on the possibility of her marriage, less out of deep love for Jim but more out of hope for a more comfortable and pleasant future. Jim, too, has been set up with her after many years of bachelorhood. Tóibín is careful not to present this relationship cynically — they obviously care for each other and get along — but, in keeping with the book’s shifted perspective, this is a romance of adults, who have already lived through much of their lives, not a first romance of teenagers.
Some of these feelings will undoubtedly ring true with readers today, but Jim and Nancy’s situation, and their attitudes, are also obviously shaped by the novel’s setting in small-town Ireland in 1976, where divorce was illegal, the Church still maintained immense control over social life and institutions (though this doesn’t play much of a role in the book), and women like Nancy yearned to be married both for companionship and to reestablish herself as a married woman in the town. Though she hasn’t been disgraced — her husband died, rather than abandoning her — this status matters.
This context informs Jim’s sudden pursuit of Eilis once she returns to town. Jim, feeling more like a teenager than a middle-aged man, is electrified by Eilis, and quickly tries to arrange any way for them to speak to each other; he’s also soon imagining leaving Ireland to move to New York with her. But he can’t, of course, tell her about Nancy, a connection made more complicated by the fact that Eilis and Nancy were once close. Eilis, meanwhile, is living a kind of fantasy herself while in Ireland, in which she tells no one about Tony’s infidelity or the baby on the way. And Nancy willingly ignores the fact that her dreams of a quiet live in the country are at odds with Jim’s love of the town, more caught up with her ideas of what the marriage will mean than the reality of the relationship.
This complicated tangle of relations relies on deception to function, and that deception hangs ominously over the novel like the sword of Damocles, sure to fall by the end of the book. In Brooklyn, Eilis herself practiced a deception on Jim, her mother, and her friends by lying about being married; here it is Jim who lies about being engaged, but because the characters are older, the stakes feel higher. Now, perhaps, these kinds of commitments would be taken less seriously; then, though, as in the nineteenth century, the self counted for less. These kinds of commitments, to other people, to maintaining a formal understanding of order in relationships and society, were prized above personal happiness. Eilis is allowed to break this order because Tony has broken it first, despite the displeasure of his family at her intransigence. For Jim, the answer is less clear.
Despite the welcome normalization of divorce, and liberation of women as a result, these kinds of commitments still rule us and our relationships: to our children (Eilis’ children, not mentioned here, play an important role in the novel), our parents and friends, and indeed our spouses if we have them (from whom, it is hoped, people in monogamous relationships do not simply flee at the first sign of frustration). If they did not, the nineteenth century social novel would have little appeal to us today, and neither would this new novel of marriage, manners, and morals. Instead, Tóibín has tapped into the melancholy experience of middle age as he did the bewildering and exhilarating experience of early adulthood in Brooklyn: an experience defined by relationships embedded in complicated history, and decisions that must be made with the consciousness of how they effect others, no matter how tempting it might be to act wholly in the interest of one’s self.
Other New Books…
The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley. Recommend this humdinger to your friends who like romances, or spy novels, or SFF, or polar exploration — basically, recommend it to everyone. I can’t remember the last time I was so delighted and enchanted by a book, or the last time I felt so sure a book I was reading would be to everyone’s taste. In it, an English civil servant is assigned to watch over polar explorer Graham Gore, of the Franklin expedition, who’s been time traveled to the future by the British “Ministry of Time.” Hi-jinks, romance, and corruption ensue. This mash-up of sensibilities, reality and fiction, and temporalities has the appeal of an unusually brilliant fanfiction, as does the romance; I read it in a day.
Whale Fall, Elizabeth O’Connor. If you read Audrey Magee’s The Colony a few years back, the set-up of this novel, about a teenage girl on a remote Welsh Island in the 1930s who begins working with English anthropologists, will be familiar to you. Both novels explore ideas of identity, ownership, and exploitation, but they’re stylistically so different that they’re both worth reading. This short novel is obviously the product of an enormous amount of research, but doesn’t feel pedantic, and it’s so cleverly constructed that what might seem like a small detail near its conclusion is so upsetting I’m still thinking about it.
Women and Children First, Alina Grabowski. I was drawn to this book, which takes place in a small town in Cape Cod, because I grew up in Massachusetts, but Grabowski is good at balancing specific details of that landscape with more universal themes about the female experience. This is a novel-in-stories that revolves around the accidental death of a teenage girl at a party, and we get to peer into the minds of her friends and family as well as women with a more distant connection to her. The structure can be a little rigid, and Grabowski sometimes falls into an easy pitfall of novels-in-stories — i.e., that we only get snatches of each character, and I at least wanted to delve deeper into several of them. But she is such a strong writer and these stories are so carefully constructed that I relished this regardless.