Taking Refuge with Librarians

Yesterday I went out in the cold, hard rain and drove to the Barnes and Noble down the road, where the perpetually bright-eyed Maureen had asked me to spend a few minutes speaking with local school librarians and teachers about young adult books. I had pictured the weather keeping most of these good people home (I'd have understood, honest), but when I got to the store I discovered not only my dear friend Joel (the elementary school librarian who had given my son such a wonderful start and has a starring role in my fourth book), but deeply-invested-in-young-people sorts from my own former middle and high school, my son's former high school, local Catholic schools, schools where I've conducted writing workshops, and elsewhere.

It was, in a word, heartening—spending this time in the company of those who care so much about the kids who wander into classrooms and libraries looking for light. Our few minutes stretched into nearly two hours. We spoke of boys and girls, and how their reading patterns differ. We talked about the role of research in personal work. We told stories about how blogs connect young readers with authors, and why that makes a difference. We considered the influential role of readergirlz. In Nothing but Ghosts, my third YA novel, I chose to celebrate, among other things, the power of librarians in the lives of the young and searching. Yesterday reminded me how precisely right that decision was.

I came home to two notes from my friend, Denise, who faces her second chemo treatment today. She'd read Brooklyn, and loved it, as I had hoped she would; she had the most interesting things to say. In addition, the pair of earrings that I'd bought for her had just arrived. Her email contained a photo of her wearing the promised colorful head scarf and the gold pyramidal flare. "Thanks to you," the note read, "I am officially a Way Cool Woman, and I have the photo to prove it."

Yesterday, on this blog, I was writing of beauty. Denise is shoulders back and spine tall and unimpeachable radiance. She has always been, and is even more so now, a most immaculate beauty.

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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.

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First-person Intimate

These instructive thoughts from Colm Toibin, in his New York Times Magazine (5/3/09) profile. The author of The Blackwater Lightship (one of my favorite books) and, newly, Brooklyn (on my list) avoids, he says, describing his protagonists, and this is why: "If you describe them physically, you actually remove them from the reader, you distance them. By not describing them, you begin to make their perception so intimately involved with the reader's perceptions that it allows the reader to enter into their spirit and become them. It's first-person intimate rather than first-person singular."

My deep thanks to the adorable Steph Bowe of heyteeanager.blogspot for her interview with me this morning.

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