When Rose - a glamorous, go-getter, the obvious heroine of a more obvious novel - makes the acquaintance of a visiting priest named Father Flood, she persuades him to sponsor Eilis and find her a job in Brooklyn where his parish is located. Because the post-World War II Irish economy is so flat, the three brothers in the family have already immigrated to England. She drifts and, in doing so, she ultimately crashes and causes emotional wreckage.Įilis and her older sister, Rose, live with their widowed mother in a small village in Ireland.

Eilis doesn't 'make a new life for herself' she acquiesces to other people's plans. That last statement is wrong, wrong, wrong. The (always-suspect) book jacket plot summary of Brooklyn declares that it's set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, 'when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.' Toibin - who's demonstrated in previous novels like The Master and Mothers and Sons that he can render just about any subject and mood - is beautifully restrained here, up until the ending, when he delivers a sucker punch worthy of his own 'master,' Henry James. The most remarkable thing about young Eilis Lacey is that she's nothing special this novel, in contrast, really is something special, partly because humdrum heroines like Eilis are so scarce and certainly because of the period atmosphere and moral complexity of Eilis' story. But, in his latest novel, Brooklyn, Colm Toibin places his mundane heroine under some kind of magical force field that rebuffs all our desires to mistakenly 'read more' into her. Dalloway or Plain Jane Eyre long enough, you come to see them as uncommon in some way - maybe especially perceptive or plucky. If, as a reader, you stick with Ishmael or Mrs. It's a quandary that even the best novelists have a hard time writing their way out of: How do you tell a story about a main character who's 'ordinary' without making that character 'extraordinary' simply because he or she is always in the novel's spotlight?

Brooklyn author colm toibin