From the first sentence, we are plunged back into the story started by Colm Tóibín fifteen years ago as if it were yesterday that we had closed. Brooklyn with tears in her eyes. What a joy to finally have news of Eilis Lacey, a very endearing heroine that the author’s exquisite pen gives us the feeling of knowing intimately. With Long Islandhis eleventh novel, the Irish writer has successfully taken up a daring challenge, that of living up to a book celebrated throughout the world and successfully brought to the big screen by John Crowley in 2015.
Married for 20 years, Eilis Lacey and Tony Fiorello have two children, or rather two teenagers, Larry and Rosella. Their house is located on a cul-de-sac in the Lindenhurst neighborhood of Long Island. In this peaceful place, swept by the salty ocean air, also live Tony’s parents, but also two of his brothers and their wives. He is a full-time plumber, she is a part-time accountant. A real postcard, at least on the surface, their existence is in every way consistent with the American dream of the 1970s. The day Eilis learns that a woman in the neighborhood is pregnant with Tony and that her mother-in-law, Francesca, intends to raise this child, her world is shattered. “A part of her life had just ended,” writes the narrator.
A return home
As The burning heather (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (2001), Brooklyn (2010) and Nora Webster (2016), the new Tóibín features Enniscorthy, the small town where the author grew up. Unlike Brooklynwhere much of the action took place in the United States, most of the pages of Long Island take place in Ireland, where Eilis decides to return for the first time in 20 years. The pretext: her mother’s 80th birthday, to whom she wants to introduce her two grandchildren. The real reason for this trip: to escape the unbearable pressure that the Fiorello clan is putting on her.
In the green island, a love triangle inevitably takes shape: the energetic Nancy, Eilis’ childhood friend, now a widow and owner of a chip shop, is having an affair with Jim Farrell, the owner of a local pub, a shy man who has never stopped loving Eilis since the summer they spent together two decades ago. In addition to giving us access to the dilemmas of the three protagonists, thoughts in which the unspoken play a crucial role, the narrator gives us a look through their eyes at a gallery of colorful characters about whom we hope other books will see the light of day. Evoking that of Edith Wharton and Henry James, Tóibín’s prose is neat, delicate, classical in the best sense of the word, often reserved and even modest in places.
Embracing shadow and light, narrow-mindedness and purity of souls, limited futures and infinite horizons, the portrait the author paints is vibrant, both romantic and sociological, tragic and realistic, intimate and collective. Because that is where Tóibín’s virtuosity lies, in this way of depicting the impulses of the heart with as much accuracy as the obstacles that society places on them. More than in the outcome of the plot, which we will of course leave to you to discover, it is in the tugs and tears that the essential lies, in the conflicts and contradictions, in short in the expression of this eternal and thrilling fight between reason and feelings.