Long Island was presented by Rosie
Present: Agnes, Barb ,Beth, Denise, Karen, Katharine, Mariannick, Muriel, Pat, Rosie
Excused: Betsy, Jennifer, Peggy, Sealia
Rosie began by saying a few things about Colm Tóibín. He was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, the fourth of five children. He began writing poetry and stories at the age of 12, soon after the death of his father. In boarding school, he became a voracious reader, and he went on to graduate from University College Dublin. He’s a prolific writer, having penned novels, short stories, essays, journalism, literary criticism, plays and poetry.
In the Watersones interview Rosie sent us, we learn that he hasn’t been back to Enniscorthy since 1976. Indeed he has moved around. He taught English in Barcelona for 3 years in the 70s; in the 80s he was a journalist in Ireland; then he worked in South America. In 1987, he published Walking Along the Border, an account of a journey on foot along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the first of many travelogues he would publish between novels. Rosie shared her view that the two halves of Ireland will merge at some point. There followed a discussion of relations between Eire and the United Kingdom.
Where is home for Tóibín? He has given an interview about belonging. Rosie mentioned that he lives with his partner in LA. Part of him obviously belongs to Enniscorthy though.
Tóibín’s first novel, The South, was completed in 1986, but not published until 1990, when it was met with widespread acclaim. He is the author of seven novels: The South; The Heather Blazing; The Story of the Night; The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction; Brooklyn, which won the Costa Fiction Award; and The Testament of Mary; as well as Mothers and Sons, a book of short stories. In all, there are 20 books to date.
Tóibín succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 2017 to 2022. He subsequently became Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan, New York City. When you listen to interviews with Tóibín, you can tell he’s a professor and you understand some of the influences on his writing. Rosie mentioned Henry James, Thomas Mann, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Louise Glück as being important. He encountered the poetry of Louise Glück while Boland and Tóibín were at Stanford together in the 2000s. Tóibín stated in 2017 that "there are a few books of mine that I have written since then that I don't think I could have written had it not been for that encounter”. When Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Tóibín immediately wrote an article in praise of her.
Since not everyone present had read Brooklyn, which deals with events 20 years before those in Long Island, Rosie summarised the plot in a sentence: “Girl goes to the USA gets married, returns home and doesn’t tell her Irish boyfriend that she’s married.”
In Rosie’s view and according to reviewers, the novel’s style is impeccable: the characters’ emotional turmoil is masked by restraint. Wendy noted that this reflects the culture of the British Isles. Tóibín doesn’t go in for any ornate showing off :“People used to tease me for it, saying: ‘Could you write a longer sentence?’” Tóibín has said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.” The novel gives an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and an idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. More than anything, we find “the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences.”
Wendy thought that the author’s genius lies in his manipulation of points of view. In the Waterstones interview he speaks of his “choreography.” Who knows what when? Who sees what when? He writes the same scene from different perspectives; for example, the wedding is seen through Eilis’s eyes as well as Nancy’s. And the beach meeting has Jim and Eilis experiencing it while Nancy observes from afar. The first section of the novel is all Eilis’s point of view. Subsequently it’s Nancy, Eilis and then Jim Farrell. This makes it a bit like a chess game. The author is moving the pieces into different configurations. It’s crucial who is at what place and what they see.
One of the things that’s most remarkable is that while in a small town one can have no secrets, this novel is all about secrets. Is this a paradox? Not really—in a place like Enniscorthy, there’s a need to keep secrets.
We liked the comparison Tóibín makes in the interview to the beginning this novel and that of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where the protagonist sells his wife and events unspool from that act. Tóibín decided to begin the sequel to Brooklyn (a sequel he never intended to write) with a similar momentous event, in this case, the arrival of a stranger at Eilis’s door and the announcement that he plans to deposit her husband’s illegitimate baby on her doorstep when it’s born. It’s one of those fateful moments from which a plot can develop. Rosie asked what we felt about this. Wendy found it far-fetched, unbelievable, although it’s a good way to begin a novel. Pat said that she understands how the man’s anger could provoke the threat. Beth felt that the visit exploded Eilis’s comfortable, serene life. Her place in Long Island is secure, but with the news of the coming baby, all security is gone. We discussed whether in the 1970s such a thing could happen. What about the birth certificate? We also wondered at the fact that Eilis was angry about the idea of bringing up the baby, but seemed less worried about Tony’s infidelity. Later on in the novel, we learn that the couple hasn’t had sex for a year and then suddenly they become passionate again, and this rekindling coincides with the adultery. Perhaps this fact explains the infidelity, because otherwise Tony seems to be a model husband and father.
Wendy thought that the character of Eilis was very cold. We discussed how little attachment she seems to have to her mother in Ireland. It’s been 20 odd years and she has not been back to visit, except for once when Rose dies. She sends lots of pictures and letters. We discussed the difference between air travel the 1970s and now. Crossing the Atlantic was much rarer then. Pat pointed out (and most of us agreed) that Eilis does not seem very real. She could be a study in alienation and culture shock. She can’t connect with the Italian family and doesn’t really belong in Enniscorthy when she returns. Denise had more sympathy for the character in Brooklyn; she understands her dithering over the two men.
By contrast, the matriarchs in Long Island seem real. Mrs Lacey is a complex character. Her status in the village is bound up with her children, so she resents the choice Eilis made in Brooklyn. Tony’s mother, the Italian Momma, is also complex, as shown by the difference of opinion we had about her. Katharine found her manipulative. Wendy found her nurturing and protective, like a mother hen. Katharine said she wants Tóibín to write the third in the series and to place the two mother-in-laws together. And Katharine imagines that now that she knows the baby has been taken into family, Eilis will get divorced when she returns to the US.
Denise pointed out that both Brooklyn and Long Island depend on secrets. Pat learned from an interview that the secrets are inspired by something Tóibín had experienced. As a child, he heard people talking about a woman who had come back to Ireland from the US. When she arrived she took off her ring and hid the fact that she had married. He didn’t know any more details, so he imagined Brooklyn based on that memory.
We then discussed the character of Jim. He’s led a flat boring life. Will he have the courage to go to the US and upend his comfortable life? He dislikes change. When Nancy discusses a move, he wants to continue living above the pub. He’s been burned twice and since then hasn’t looked for a lasting relationship. It’s Colette who tells him what to do and who matches him with Nancy.
For Nancy the engagement to Jim could be called a “transactional relationship.” She has something to gain from it besides love. She could stop working at the chip shop and build the bungalow of her dreams. We appreciated the portrayal of Nancy and had sympathy for the character. She has had a difficult life. Beth pointed out that she’s a good businesswoman and she seems a good person. She was happily married to George before he died and left her to take care of the children alone. The marriage with Jim would offer respectability. They keep the engagement secret because of her daughter’s wedding. As soon as Nancy becomes aware that Eilis is seeing Jim, she uses social pressure to end the relationship and secure her own future. She goes to Eilis’s mother to announce the engagement. Mrs Lacey is not surprised because they’d been seen by a neighbour.
Eilis hasn’t fully committed to being with Jim. She says she‘ll send for him, but she doesn’t really commit. She seems more assertive than Jim is. Does she sleep with him out of revenge? Is the photograph of the baby sent from the USA a prompt for her decision to take up with Jim again? Jim seems to be wavering. He can’t imagine himself making a new life in the US, not knowing what to say to people in a bar or how to act. He needs someone to decide for him. He’d be dependent on Eilis and she’s not very dependable. Is her marriage over? She has been offered the means to have her own home, but for the moment, she seems to want to say with Tony because of the children. Katharine remarked that the novel is not a romcom; there is no happy ending. She wondered whether Tóibín (who is gay) wanted to show the dystopic nature of heterosexual relationships.
Rosie asked whether anything in the novel surprises us. Katharine mentioned the night spent in Dublin in the hotel room. Eilis is very matter-of-fact about spending the night with Jim. There is a distinct lack of foreplay. She could be motivated by a calculated wish for revenge. Another thing that surprised Katharine was that we weren’t given a meeting of the members of the adulterous triangle in Long Island. In fact, the wife of the Irishman is never portrayed. For Rosie, the night spent in Dublin is the harbinger of doom. At that moment, she felt that the novel was not going to end well.
Is the open end “a completion” as the author says in the Waterstones interview? Tóibín implies that the big decisions have been made and it’s over—the characters’ destinies are traced. He says he has had pushback on the ending. Then he mentions how in Middlemarch George Eliot tells us how everyone continued after the main events. That’s not what Tóibín wanted to do. He wanted to be more like Henry James, who leaves everything in suspension. Katharine said that she didn’t want to read the ending again. And Rosie didn’t like ending because it’s sad. She doesn’t like that Jim doesn’t know what to do but feels compelled to open the champagne. Is this a sign that Nancy has won him? That he’s bound to stay in Enniscorthy? That’s the beauty of the novel’s open ending. We are left to speculate.
