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: Love and loneliness in 1950s Brooklyn
Summary: 5 Stars
It's 1950 and there's no work for the likes of Eilis Lacey, a quiet, intelligent, working-class girl in small-town Enniscorthy, Ireland. Her father dead and her brothers having gone off to Liverpool for work, Eilis lives with her mother and her glamorous, self-assured older sister, Rose, who works as a secretary.
When Eilis completes her bookkeeping course and lands nothing better than one day a week at a local grocery run by a snooty spinster, Rose decides it's time her younger sister made the big leap - across the pond to Brooklyn. Using the Irish network of Church and immigrant community, Rose procures her a job and a room in a women's' boarding house.
Reluctant, shy and lonely, Eilis keeps pretty much to herself. Competent and polite, she makes a good impression on her superiors at work and her landlady, while the other tenants make half-hearted attempts to enlist her in their shifting and often mean-spirited alliances.
Quietly unhappy, Rose soldiers on, keeping her alienation at bay until she gets her first letters from home and plunges into a debilitating bout of homesickness.
The floor manager at the Italian-owned clothing store where she works notices the change and takes her aside. It won't do to have one of their salesgirls looking bereft. Eilis answers her questions simply and soon realizes she won't be fired.
"As a result, she was almost proud of how she had managed Miss Fortini, letting her ask all the questions and answering as little as she could, but enough not to seem surly or ungrateful. She felt almost strong as she contemplated what had just happened and she resolved that no matter who came into the room now, even if were Mr. Bartocci himself, she would be able to elicit their sympathy."
Eilis does not intend dishonesty: "But she could not tell them that she dreaded their shop and their customers, and that she hated Mrs. Kehoe's house, and there was nothing any of them could do for her."
From this low point, a turning point. The priest in charge of her welfare enrolls her in a business class at night. Without meaning to do anything but get through each day, Eilis says little and lets people believe pretty much what they want. What was a tendency in her self-effacing nature becomes a tactic, a means of eliciting good will and approval, if not friendship and intimacy.
She still does a lot of things she doesn't want to, in the spirit of going along to get along, but life grows easier and the occasional burst of self-assertion rocks people back and keeps her from getting trod on.
One of these moments occurs shortly after Eilis is assigned to the new counter for Negro hosiery at Bartocci's. Eilis is as racist as the next immigrant and has no particular feelings about blacks one way or the other. The black women who come into the store are well dressed, and ignore her totally, even during the transaction. "The few who did speak to her used tones of such elaborate politeness that they made her feel awkward and shy." The "fierce tension" in the store leaves her exhausted.
But when one of her fellow lodgers makes a snooty racist remark about steering clear of the place, Eilis bridles. "I'll tell Mr. Bartocci that. He'll be very upset Sheila. You and your friend here are famous for your style, especially for the ladders in your stockings and the fussy old cardigans you wear."
Shortly afterwards she meets a young man at a dance. He's Italian, which creates a little fuss at the lodging house, giving Eilis occasion for another sharp remark:
"'I think we have to be very careful about men we don't know coming into the hall,' Sheila Heffernan said.
"'Maybe if we got rid of some of the wallflowers, Sheila,' Eilis said, `with the sour look on their faces.'"
Eilis' young man, Tony, is funny and good-natured. A plumber, he lives in a cramped apartment with his parents and brothers, where they plan a better future on Long Island, building houses.
He's as open as Eilis is guarded and sweeps her off her feet as best he can, though she drags her heels a bit. In this new love affair she is feeling her way, cautious, while Tony knows what he wants. Eilis's way of "holding him at a distance" is to withhold information about herself or her feelings. But sometimes not speaking up is a form of encouragement as well. Is Eilis in love or is she enjoying the attention and the novelty? Even she isn't sure.
Toibin's spare, incisive prose draws the reader into Eilis' soul until we see the world through her eyes. Her view of Brooklyn - a grimy, bustling, alien place - gradually becomes more ordinary, its crowds more colorful than frightening, its strangeness more alluring than intimidating.
His prose quiet and measured, Toibin conveys the intensity of her experience in the vividness of moments, the pervasiveness of loneliness, the excitement of new experiences, whether it be putting change into the pale palm of a black hand or attending a ballgame at Ebbet's Field. Our level of comfort rises with Eilis,' until suddenly her old life intervenes and Eilis must make a choice, alarming the reader with her dangerous drifting and procrastination.
Engaging and entirely absorbing, "Brooklyn" is an exquisite portrait of 1950s impoverished Old World Ireland and the raw, hard-knocks opportunities of Brooklyn bustle. But mostly it's the story of one young woman's coming-of-age, her struggle to retain control of her life in the maelstrom of the world.
Beautifully constructed, eloquently told, this is an outstanding accomplishment from a world-renowned author.
Summary of Brooklyn: A Novel
From the award-winning author of The Master, a hauntingly compelling novel?by far TÓibÍn?s most accessible book?set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s about a young woman torn between her family in Ireland and the american who wins her heart.Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, Eilis cannot find a proper job in the miserable Irish economy.
When an Irish priest from Brooklyn visits the household and offers to sponsor Eilis in America?to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"?she realizes she must go, leaving her fragile mother and sister behind.
Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and studies accounting at Brooklyn College, and, when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian, slowly wins her over with persistent charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. Eilis is in love. But just as she begins to consider what this means, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her new life.
With the emotional resonance of Alice McDermott?s At Weddings and Wakes, Brooklyn is by far TÓibÍn?s most inviting, engaging novel.
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Committed to a quiet life in little Enniscorthy, Ireland, the industrious young Eilis Lacey reluctantly finds herself swept up in an unplanned adventure to America, engineered by the family priest and her glamorous, "ready for life" sister, Rose. Eilis's determination to embrace the spirit of the journey despite her trepidation--especially on behalf of Rose, who has sacrificed her own chance of leaving--makes a bittersweet center for Brooklyn. Colm Tóibín's spare portrayal of this contemplative girl is achingly lovely, and every sentence rings with truth. Readers will find themselves swept across the Atlantic with Eilis to a boarding house in Brooklyn where she painstakingly adapts to a new life, reinventing herself and her surroundings in the letters she writes home. Just as she begins to settle in with the help of a new love, tragedy calls her home to Enniscorthy, and her separate lives suddenly and painfully merge into one. Tóibín's haunted heroine glows on the page, unforgettably and lovingly rendered, and her story reflects the lives of so many others exiled from home. --Daphne Durham
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