Brooklyn

Content Warning: This novel and review contain references to death. 

Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) is a story about the costs of leaving home. When Eilis Lacey leaves her insular Irish village and sets out into the American unknown, she must orient to a life she didn’t choose.

Eilis’s abrupt departure from home—arranged by her older, glamorous sister Rose—subverts expectations of the typical American emigration story. Eilis doesn’t abandon Enniscorthy because she’s an adventure-seeking young woman desperate to sever ties with her family or culture. She doesn’t arrive in the alleged metropolitan utopia with a sense of possibility. Rather, loneliness and disorientation plague her in the unfamiliar new environment. Tóibín mines her reluctant interiority to create quiet narrative propulsion and incisive commentary on the human condition. Forced to interrogate who she is for the first time, the questions Eilis asks herself prove more momentous than her lived experiences in Brooklyn.

Told with Tóibín’s characteristic linguistic control and emotional deftness, Brooklyn undoes tired notions of home as a place to discard and America as a place where everybody becomes real. Eilis’s story rather highlights the subtle effects of place on the human spirit and asks what it means to simultaneously occupy multiple time zones, borderlines, and versions of self.

Eilis Lacey secures a job in her hometown of Enniscorthy, Ireland; convinced she’s coming into her womanhood, she hopes to please and help support her mother and sister, Rose. Rose quickly deems the job insufficient for an intelligent woman like Eilis and arranges for her to start a better life in Brooklyn, New York.

A family friend helps Eilis when she arrives, but the place’s unfamiliarity unsettles her. She’s surrounded by “strange people, strange accents, strange streets” (241). The food is bland. The winter is too cold. She knows no one.

Eilis works at a department store, starts bookkeeping classes, and begins adjusting. Her landlady gives her a nice room, she attends dances, and she meets Tony, a young Italian man who rapidly falls in love with her. However, when Rose dies in her sleep from a heart condition she hid from the family, Eilis returns home. She marries Tony before leaving—a decision that doubles as a promise to return to Brooklyn.

Back home, Eilis feels different. She’s more stoic and confident, and she carries herself with “something close to glamor” (236). She sees beauty in Enniscorthy she never noticed before. The longer she is home, the more her life in Brooklyn feels “part of a dream,” lacking “substance or form” (246).

She takes Rose’s job, reconnects with friends, and starts dating a man named Jim. Regretting her marriage to Tony, intrigued by her feelings for Jim, and worried about leaving her mother again, Eilis wonders if she should stay in Enniscorthy.

Just as she’s about to discard her Brooklyn life, Eilis learns that a local woman discovered her and Tony’s elopement. She realizes the conservative Jim would never settle down with a married—or divorced—woman and buys her return ticket to Brooklyn.

In Brooklyn, Tóibín translates the stale “voyage to America” tale into a quiet examination of longing, homesickness, and indecision. Instead of locating his immigration story within a curious, adventure-seeking character, Tóibín tells the tale of a reluctant, reserved young woman who isn’t sure she wants change at all. However, it is Eilis’s very passivity that makes Brooklyn work from beginning to end.

Void of high action or high drama, Brooklyn instead finds its momentum, depth, and resonance within Eilis’s interiority. In Liesl Schillinger’s New York Times review of the novel, she deems Tóibín “an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions” (Schillinger, Lisa. “The Reluctant Emigrant.” The New York Times, 3 May 2009). In all of his novels, Tóibín delves into the seemingly calcified facets of the human psyche to unearth subtle truths about the human experience. This is particularly evident in Brooklyn, where the primary narrative tension originates from Eilis’s intentionally stifled thoughts and emotions.

A young Irish woman living in the 1950s, Eilis is partially a product of her era and partially a product of her conservative Enniscorthy family and village. She does her best to quash what she’s feeling and keep a smile on her face. She fears appearing weak or bothering people with her passing emotions. But the longer Eilis is in Brooklyn, the less capable she feels of burying what she’s feeling. Her loneliness is “a terrible weight” that creates “an ache in her chest” (69). Over time the physical burden of Eilis’s alienation, despondency, and sense of purposelessness begets poignant metaphysical commentaries on the page.

Tóibín intentionally avoids purpling Eilis’s world with ornate descriptions or sentimental love scenes. What’s most important to Eilis is answering the question: Who am I? For Eilis, the question is twofold: Who am I in Brooklyn, and who am I in Enniscorthy? Tóibín investigates what it means if she is not the same person in both places.

In an interview that Elena Ferrante gave for The Guardian, she discussed the extent to which a person can reinvent herself away from her origins. Ferrante argued that leaving one’s home “is not betraying one’s origins” but is necessary for gaining perspective on them (Ferrante, Elena. “We don’t have to fear change, what is other shouldn’t frighten us.” The Guardian, 29 Aug. 2000). Only in “other places, in contact with other people,” Ferrante argues, can one “begin timidly to say to [oneself] ‘I’” (“We don’t have to fear change”). In returning home, one remembers their true foundation and can see it with more dimension.

Ferrante’s principles of departure, return, and self-discovery inform Tóibín’s explorations of home in Brooklyn. Through Eilis, Tóibín shows that leaving the village, town, or country of one’s origin doesn’t mean killing off one’s past self to don a new identity. Instead, departing means opening oneself to the multiplicity that the self contains. Eilis’s greatest adventure in Brooklyn isn’t venturing between Ireland and America; it’s wandering the vast expanses of her inner world and finding that she can be anyone, no one, and everyone all at once.