‘Long Island’: A story about emotive logic and all that it entails

Like a woodcut artist thinking in terms of negative light, or a jazz musician measuring silence not beats, the pleasures of a Colm Tóibín novel often lie in the unsaid. Repressed feelings, buried recriminations, awkward silences being papered over with small talk. The Irish novelist, who has demonstrated his mastery over these elements, employs it again in Long Island, the sequel to the most critically and commercially successful book of his career, Brooklyn (2009). Unlike the decidedly slow-burning Brooklyn, however, Long Island drops its dramatic bombshell loudly and flamboyantly in the opening pages.

The protagonist of Brooklyn, 20-something Eilis Lacey, is in her 40s at the beginning of Long Island, married to Italian-American plumber Tony Fiorello and mother to Rosella and Larry. She is paid a home visit by a man who says his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child. “His plumbing is so good that she is to have a baby in August,” the man sneers. A nasty, uncouth joke by Tóibín’s standards but then this is a nasty and uncouth situation. Tony’s parents, who live next door, then try to convince Eilis that the child will be part of her wifely responsibilities.

Everything that unfolds in the rest of Long Island flows downwards from this “ground zero” event. Explosive opening out of the way, Tóibín settles down into a familiar stately pace. Mirroring Brooklyn, Eilis leaves for her hometown Enniscorthy in Ireland’s county Wexford. Toíbín grew up there himself and it has been the setting for The Heather Blazing (1992), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and Nora Webster (2014). Eilis is accompanied by her teenaged children.

There’s so much to admire here—Tóibín’s razor-sharp attention to character arcs, for one. Eilis’ best friend Nancy, now a widow with grown-up children, has quietly become engaged to Jim Farrell, the man Eilis had an extramarital affair with in Brooklyn. And it’s clear that Jim (played with quiet dignity by Domnhall Gleeson in the 2015 movie), whatever he expresses in front of her, is still not over Eilis. Tóibín gives all three central characters arcs that truly embrace everything they’ve been through—grief, abandonment, displacement. He is equally confident being inside all of their heads. At different points in the novel, all three are given the narratorial wheel, and every one of them commands the reader’s attention effortlessly. That Tóibín is able to do so is in large part because of his beautiful, immaculately constructed paragraphs. He has never been a flashy writer yet together, his sentences have an unshakeable sense of collective purpose.

Other familiar Tóibín strengths reassert themselves, like the writer’s perennial meditations and variations on the mother-child relationship, especially when it’s strained, like it is in The Blackwater Lightship. Fittingly, the actress who played Eilis in Brooklyn, Saoirse Ronan, is best known for her role in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, the story of a difficult but ultimately redemptive mother-daughter relationship.

Here, too, Eilis’ best friend Nancy is anxious about her upcoming nuptials to Jim—not because she is unsure of the man but because her own daughter is also about to be married. Nancy fears her daughter will accuse her of “upstaging” her big moment. Meanwhile, Eilis is amused and a little frightened by her aggressively American son Larry discovering the hospitality of Irish taverns. Tóibín approaches these scenes with subtlety and gentle humour, allows his characters to breathe without having to constantly suffuse each utterance with supreme purpose. Even when mothers are upset at their errant children, they do not view them as extensions of their own selves, doomed to repeat the sins of the mother.

Tóibín has absolute confidence in the retentive powers of his story; he seldom allows the “real” world to encroach upon his tableaux. The year in which these events take place is not specified, though a few throwaway references to Watergate anchor us in the mid-1970s, but neither of Eilis’ children seem affected by the dominant register of a busy decade.

This is a story concerned with emotive logic and all that it entails. More than realism, Long Island is about the interwoven strands of desire, compulsion and motivation that make up reality for most people. There’s a scene in the novel’s Irish midsection where Eilis notes that one day, she’d want to tell her kids the story of how she came to America (the story of Brooklyn). She therefore resents her husband’s brothers when they “invented another version (…) as a way of entertaining the table”. As that phrase indicates, Tóibín’s novels usually have a point to make about the writerly cynicism of piling on plot twist upon plot twist. He comes perilously close to doing it himself with Long Island, because an awful lot happens in the last 60-70 pages of the book. But perhaps because this busy third act is preceded by pages of rare serenity, Long Island never feels rushed or haphazard. It is a suitably brilliant sequel to Brooklyn but more importantly, it is a great novel on its own.

Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.