Review: Brooklyn

Reviewer: Mary Meyer
Book: Brooklyn
Author: Colm Toibin
Genre: Fiction

The novel “Brooklyn” by Colm Toibin (Scribner, 2009) is the riveting account of a young woman’s journey from a small village in Ireland to big city America in the 1950s.

Unlike her popular, attractive and athletic sister Rose, Eilis Lacey is unable to find full-time work in her Irish village. Although Eilis, not Rose, appears to be a more suitable caretaker for their aging mother, Irish priest Father Flood arranges for Eilis to move to New York. He lines up housing and work in a Brooklyn department store.

In clear and simple language, author Toibin paints a realistic picture of Eilis’s reactions to her new environment – overwhelming homesickness, anxiety about making friends with the other women who live in her boarding house, curiosity about men and the possibilities of striking up a romance, and diligence in her pursuit of higher education by attending night class.

Just as her new life settles into place (she falls in love with an Italian plumber and finishes her bookkeeping education), shocking news regarding her sister Rose turns her world upside down.

I found this book mesmerizing. The author provides a strong sense of how individuals are trapped by accidental circumstance and misfortune. Eilis’s personality is constantly defined by the narrowness of her experience. She cannot develop outside of the set of circumscribed choices at hand. She can only remain alert and watchful, carefully considering options that she is powerless to control. Her mistakes are heart-breaking.

“Brooklyn” is Colm Toibin’s sixth novel. His novels “The Master” and “The Blackwater Lightship” were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He won the LA Times book Prize in fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He lives in Dublin and is a visiting professor at Princeton University.