Looking for Home in Colm Toibin's Brooklyn

I didn't buy Colm Toibin's Brooklyn because it was on the Newsweek list. I didn't buy it because others were speaking of it, though that always helps. I bought it because Toibin can be a transporting writer, and I needed to be taken somewhere.

Brooklyn took me somewhere. Oh, it did. It's a straightforward-seeming story that is anything but—a chronologically clear progression that hardly dawdles for flashbacks, that doesn't go in for psychowonder, that doesn't delight itself with literary pyrotechnics, that doesn't foot the bottom of the page with a rash of clever footnotes. Brooklyn is a story. It brings us Eilis Lacey, an Irish girl of no great beauty, who finds herself in Brooklyn, New York, following the behind-the-scenes maneuvers of her gracious sister, Rose.

Eilis isn't sure she should be in Brooklyn. Not sure she is the sister who should have been given this chance, in these post-World War II years, for this strange new lease on life. Not sure she'll survive the early homesickness and loss, and yet she does—taking a job, enrolling in night courses, allowing herself to be cared for by a priest and a nosy landlord, and falling—she thinks—in love until she imagines a future in a foreign country with a light-skinned Italian man.

Tragedy calls her back home, to Ireland. Choices must be made.

How brilliantly Toibin arranges Eilis on the page. She is sturdy, reticent, sometimes prickly, profoundly reliable, curious, insatiable, thinking big thoughts and keeping them to herself. She has ambitions, but most wouldn't know it. She has desires; they are at times in conflict with what she knows to be kind or right. She has, she suspects, a dark center. She envies those who live within clarity and light.

I loved Eilis. I know her. I loved the decisions Toibin made with this book. I loved how he allowed a simple story to build toward high, breathless tension. There are no crimes here. There is no violence. There is only what happens when a good woman in an odd circumstance is faced with possibilities and cannot bring herself to choose (to go through one door, to close another) until it is nearly too late.

Or is it too late? For Eilis will always wonder, I think, about the path from which she turns.

Read Brooklyn.