In the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey, a fictional character, said goodbye to Enniscorthy, the real town in County Wexford, Ireland, where her creator, the novelist Colm Tóibín, would be born a few years later. She crossed the Atlantic, making her way to Brooklyn and into “Brooklyn,” Tóibín’s near-perfect 2009 novel about her emigration.
Eilis was often lonely, but she was hardly alone. In the 1950s, Ireland lost more than 15 percent of its population to emigration; 50,000 of those who left made their way to America. But Eilis wasn’t a statistic or a symbol: She was a soul — a witty, observant, sometimes anxious young woman finding her way and her place in the world. (Both her caution and her boldness were superbly captured by Saoirse Ronan in John Crowley’s film adaptation.)
Where would Eilis go from Brooklyn? The obvious answer, supplied in the title of Tóibín’s new novel, “Long Island,” was foreshadowed in the earlier book. On one of their dates, Tony Fiorello, a Bensonhurst plumber and Eilis’s eventual husband, tells her about his plan to start a construction business with his brothers out on the island, with a cluster of houses where the whole extended Fiorello family will live.
As “Long Island” gets underway, that plan has long since come to pass. It’s the mid-1970s, and Eilis has taken part in another large-scale demographic movement, the exodus from the cities to the suburbs. She lives with Tony and their two teenage children near a bevy of in-laws.
The voyage to America, encouraged by her older sister, Rose, and enabled by a helpful priest, wasn’t entirely Eilis’s idea. Neither was the relocation to Long Island — that was Tony’s dream. But Eilis is hardly passive. She is an interesting and vivid character because she manages to make her destiny her choice. She may be constrained, in Lindenhurst as in Enniscorthy, by social norms and family expectations, but in her own mind, and in the eyes of sympathetic readers, she is free.
In the opening pages of “Long Island,” fate deals her a wild card. Or rather, Tony does. A stranger shows up at Eilis’s door to inform her that his wife is pregnant and that Tony, who had done some repairs for the family, is the father.
“If anyone thinks I am keeping an Italian plumber’s brat in my house and have my own children believe that it came into the world as decently as they did, they can have another think,” he tells her. Because he is Irish, Eilis takes him at his word. And perhaps because she is Irish, she is equally adamant. “The baby will not pass the threshold,” she tells her mother-in-law, who clearly has something else in mind.
Tony’s transgression, and his family’s response to it, underscores Eilis’s alienation from the large Italian American family she has married into. With her marriage in limbo, she decides to return to Enniscorthy for the first time in more than 20 years. Her children, Larry and Rosella — who have had “no real interest in Enniscorthy, or even Ireland” — will join her for part of the summer.
Readers of “Brooklyn” will recall that Eilis’s previous trip home came in the wake of Rose’s death. If you’re just joining her, Tóibín offers a succinct recap of that visit:
That summer, in Enniscorthy, Eilis had a romance with Jim Farrell. No one … knew that she was, by that time, married to Tony. They had got married in Brooklyn. Eilis had wanted to tell her mother as soon as she arrived home, but it was too hard because it meant that, no matter what, she would have to go back to America.
So she told no one, no one at all. And then, at summer’s end, she had abruptly left, just as Jim was making it clear that he wanted to marry her.
This loose end turns into the warp and woof of “Long Island.” Jim, who never married and never got over Eilis, manages a pub he inherited from his parents. He has been carrying on a discreet affair with Nancy, who had been Eilis’s best friend and who is now a widow running a chip shop in town. Jim and Nancy take pains to avoid the inquisitive eyes and judgmental tongues of their neighbors, but once Eilis shows up no secrets are safe.
Eilis herself, with her rented car and her Americanized attitudes, attracts envious, curious, suspicious scrutiny, including from her own mother. Meanwhile, her renewed connection with Jim and Nancy, coming on the heels of her marital crisis back home, sends her and the novel into a swirl of complicated feelings and difficult choices.
“Long Island” is both a sequel to “Brooklyn” and a companion to “Nora Webster,” Tóibín’s 2014 novel — his masterpiece, in my opinion — about another Enniscorthy woman’s struggle for autonomy. Eilis’s mother makes an appearance in that novel, which is set in the late 1960s and early ’70s. While events in the wider world are mentioned in all three books — the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the war in Vietnam — these are not historical novels in the usual sense. Tóibín’s interest is in the finer grain of individual perception.
He brings us close enough to Eilis, and to Nora, to see what and how they think, but not so close as to invade their privacy or compromise their dignity. In an autobiographical essay, Tóibín applied James Merrill’s description of Elizabeth Bishop to his own mother, who gave “a lifelong impersonation of an ordinary woman.” Nora and Eilis are drawn in similar terms, their ordinary experiences of migration, marriage and motherhood filtered through an intense and meticulously observed inner life. What holds the reader’s eye, in “Brooklyn” and “Nora Webster,” are not the external movements of a plot but the intimacy and accuracy of the portrait.
“Long Island” is a busier book than its predecessors, more exciting in some ways but in others less satisfying. There is more plot — more incidents and coincidences, more twists and revelations — and less Eilis. Her point of view alternates with Jim’s and Nancy’s, which heightens the drama but also feels like something of a betrayal. Like the busybodies of Enniscorthy, we are preoccupied with what Eilis will do next — no spoilers here — and less attentive to who she is. This exquisitely drawn, idiosyncratic soul turns out to be just another character in a novel after all.
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