Reviewed by Ted Gioia
When did the immigrant experience in the United States assume its position as
the preferred framing story for epic American narratives? I imagine that the
turning point came in the 1970s, with The Godfather and Roots. Certainly the
story line is just as popular today, especially in
the literary arena—check out, for example,
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (reportedly on
Barack Obama’s reading list) as well as Pulitzer
Prize winning novels such as Junot Diaz’s The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Michael
Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay.
Now Colm Tóibín shows that even an Irish
novelist can find inspiration in the American
melting pot. Perhaps we should not be surprised.
Tóibín himself has lived outside his native country
and traveled extensively. His first novel, The
South (1990) clearly drew on his own experiences
residing in Barcelona, and his best known work,
The Master (2004), is a fictionalized character
study of Henry James, the novelist most closely
associated with the nuances of Americans in Euorpe and Europeans in America—
although the characters in James’s books aren’t the kind who showed up at Ellis
Island knowing hardly a word of English.
Brooklyn, set in the period following the end of World War II, opens more than
three thousand miles away from its title location. Eilis Lacey lives with her older
sister and mother in a small Irish city, where jobs are scarce and opportunities
to break out of the rigid hierarchies of local society almost non-existent. A
visiting priest from Brooklyn offers to find work and lodging for Eilis in America—
and it only gradually dawns on the girl that her older sister Rose has hatched
this plan behind her back.
Eilis is uneasy at the thought of moving away from home and embarking upon
an unknown life far away, but feels compelled to hide her anxieties, if only to
avoid upsetting the family members she leaves behind. While other authors
have focused on the promise of the New World in their accounts of immigrants,
Tóibín is more attuned to the world abandoned. Even before Lacey gets on the
boat to America we can sense that this will be no conventional rags-to-riches
tale.
Tóibín presents his story with compassion and honesty, yet never falls into
sentimentality—which could easily happen given the focus here on romance,
family, loss and loneliness. There is nothing flamboyant about this novel, and in
an endearing sort of way, that is one of its great virtues. As I mentioned above,
the immigrant experience in America has become a subject of epic proportions—
and one of the results is that storytellers tend to overreach in how these
accounts are presented nowadays. Uncle Gustav may have come to the US to
be a carpenter, Grandpa Moe may have arrived to pursue a career as an
accountant, but they are transformed into Achilles with an accent and Odysseus
with a green card when their stories are now told. But not in Brooklyn, where
the novel unfolds on the smallest of scales and where the nuances and details
give life to each page.
Lacey’s assimilation in New York life sets the stage for the central drama of
Tóibín’s book—which oddly enough takes place back in Ireland. The history
books rarely look at the immigrants who refused to melt in the melting pot, who
went back to their native countries to resume their old lives, but these stories
are often even more poignant than the sunny accounts of assimilation and
upward mobility by successful new arrivals. Will our heroine be one of these
American dropouts?
A family tragedy forces Lacey to return home for what she thinks will be a short
visit. Yet the longer she stays in Ireland, the more she forgets the life she has
been building for herself in the United States. She delays her return trip, and
defers making any final choice between staying and going. A decision is forced
upon her, and she realizes—perhaps the most painful truth that those who
have moved long distances in their life learn from these relocations—that no
matter what choice she makes, it will come at a heavy price. Moreover it is
always a price that can never be estimated, even years later, since what might
have resulted from taking another path inevitably remains a mystery.
In truth, this is the plight of anyone who moves from one country to another.
But Tóibín has captured this sense of the tragedy of choice, the loss that
accompanies any decisive moment in our lives, better than any author I have
read. No, this is not another epic on the immigrant experience, no “Once Upon a
Time in America . . .” type of tale. Brooklyn is rather the story behind those
larger-than-life accounts, and a reminder that new worlds are constructed only
by those brave enough to walk away from the old ones.
This review originally appeared on Blogcritics.
When did the immigrant experience in the United States assume its position as
the preferred framing story for epic American narratives? I imagine that the
turning point came in the 1970s, with The Godfather and Roots. Certainly the
story line is just as popular today, especially in
the literary arena—check out, for example,
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (reportedly on
Barack Obama’s reading list) as well as Pulitzer
Prize winning novels such as Junot Diaz’s The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Michael
Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay.
Now Colm Tóibín shows that even an Irish
novelist can find inspiration in the American
melting pot. Perhaps we should not be surprised.
Tóibín himself has lived outside his native country
and traveled extensively. His first novel, The
South (1990) clearly drew on his own experiences
residing in Barcelona, and his best known work,
The Master (2004), is a fictionalized character
study of Henry James, the novelist most closely
associated with the nuances of Americans in Euorpe and Europeans in America—
although the characters in James’s books aren’t the kind who showed up at Ellis
Island knowing hardly a word of English.
Brooklyn, set in the period following the end of World War II, opens more than
three thousand miles away from its title location. Eilis Lacey lives with her older
sister and mother in a small Irish city, where jobs are scarce and opportunities
to break out of the rigid hierarchies of local society almost non-existent. A
visiting priest from Brooklyn offers to find work and lodging for Eilis in America—
and it only gradually dawns on the girl that her older sister Rose has hatched
this plan behind her back.
Eilis is uneasy at the thought of moving away from home and embarking upon
an unknown life far away, but feels compelled to hide her anxieties, if only to
avoid upsetting the family members she leaves behind. While other authors
have focused on the promise of the New World in their accounts of immigrants,
Tóibín is more attuned to the world abandoned. Even before Lacey gets on the
boat to America we can sense that this will be no conventional rags-to-riches
tale.
Tóibín presents his story with compassion and honesty, yet never falls into
sentimentality—which could easily happen given the focus here on romance,
family, loss and loneliness. There is nothing flamboyant about this novel, and in
an endearing sort of way, that is one of its great virtues. As I mentioned above,
the immigrant experience in America has become a subject of epic proportions—
and one of the results is that storytellers tend to overreach in how these
accounts are presented nowadays. Uncle Gustav may have come to the US to
be a carpenter, Grandpa Moe may have arrived to pursue a career as an
accountant, but they are transformed into Achilles with an accent and Odysseus
with a green card when their stories are now told. But not in Brooklyn, where
the novel unfolds on the smallest of scales and where the nuances and details
give life to each page.
Lacey’s assimilation in New York life sets the stage for the central drama of
Tóibín’s book—which oddly enough takes place back in Ireland. The history
books rarely look at the immigrants who refused to melt in the melting pot, who
went back to their native countries to resume their old lives, but these stories
are often even more poignant than the sunny accounts of assimilation and
upward mobility by successful new arrivals. Will our heroine be one of these
American dropouts?
A family tragedy forces Lacey to return home for what she thinks will be a short
visit. Yet the longer she stays in Ireland, the more she forgets the life she has
been building for herself in the United States. She delays her return trip, and
defers making any final choice between staying and going. A decision is forced
upon her, and she realizes—perhaps the most painful truth that those who
have moved long distances in their life learn from these relocations—that no
matter what choice she makes, it will come at a heavy price. Moreover it is
always a price that can never be estimated, even years later, since what might
have resulted from taking another path inevitably remains a mystery.
In truth, this is the plight of anyone who moves from one country to another.
But Tóibín has captured this sense of the tragedy of choice, the loss that
accompanies any decisive moment in our lives, better than any author I have
read. No, this is not another epic on the immigrant experience, no “Once Upon a
Time in America . . .” type of tale. Brooklyn is rather the story behind those
larger-than-life accounts, and a reminder that new worlds are constructed only
by those brave enough to walk away from the old ones.
This review originally appeared on Blogcritics.
Brooklyn
by Colm Tóibín
by Colm Tóibín
Great Books Guide
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| Contact Ted Gioia at tedgioia@hotmail.com Visit his web site at www.tedgioia.com Great Books Guide is an Amazon.com associate Visit Blogcritics Related sites The New Canon Conceptual Fiction Disclosure: This web site and its sister sites may receive promotional copies of review items and other materials from publisher, publicists and other parties. |
OTHER ARTICLES OF NOTE
FROM GREAT BOOKS GUIDE
The Best Works of Fiction of
the Decade 2000-2009
Exhuming Robert Musil: A
Fresh Look at The Man
Without Qualities
The Fourteen Skies of Michael
Chabon
Life After Potter
The Nobel Prize in Literature
from an Alternative Universe
Hamlet Wore Ladies
Underwear (and other literary
secrets outed)
FROM GREAT BOOKS GUIDE
The Best Works of Fiction of
the Decade 2000-2009
Exhuming Robert Musil: A
Fresh Look at The Man
Without Qualities
The Fourteen Skies of Michael
Chabon
Life After Potter
The Nobel Prize in Literature
from an Alternative Universe
Hamlet Wore Ladies
Underwear (and other literary
secrets outed)
| Selected Reviews (2007-2010) BY TED GIOIA Robert Stone [click here] Don DeLillo [click here] Joshua Ferris [click here] Paul Auster [click here] Philip Roth [click here] Jonathan Lethem [click here] Richard Powers [click here] Jedediah Berry [click here] Richard Russo [click here] Thomas Pynchon [click here] Reif Larsen [click here] Arthur Phillips [click here] Colm Tóibín [click here] Jayne Anne Phillips [click here] Geoff Dyer [click here] T.C. Boyle [click here] Jonathan Littell [click here] Daniel Suarez [click here] Jim Harrison [click here] José Saramago [click here] Toni Morrison [click here] Roberto Bolaño [click here] Chuck Klosterman [click here] Paul Auster [click here] Philip Roth [click here] Julian Barnes [click here] Marilynne Robinson [click here] Tim Winton [click here] Jonathan Miles [click here] Jhumpa Lahiri [click here] Joseph O'Neill [click here] Richard Price [click here] Tobias Wolff [click here] Donald Ray Pollock [click here] Charles Bock [click here] Geraldine Brooks [click here] Alan Bennett [click here] Mario Vargas Llosa [click here] Denis Johnson [click here] Philip Roth [click here] Ann Patchett [click here] Junot Diaz [click here] Matt Ruff [click here] Ryszard Kapuściński [click here] Roberto Bolaño [click here] Jack Kerouac [click here] John Leland [click here] Ian McEwan [click here] Khaled Hosseini [click here] Don DeLillo [click here] Michael Chabon [click here] Haruki Murakami [click here] Jonathan Lethem [click here] Michael Ondaatje [click here] Steven Hall [click here] |