Book Reviews by Robert Rorke

After securing her place as novelist of substance, as opposed to the other kind of novelist that haunts the best seller lists, Zadie Smith ( White Teeth: A Novel , On Beauty ) began writing essays in publications whose editors were eager to work with her: The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the trendy Believer. She wrote on expected serious topics (E.M. Forster, George Eliot) and then surprisingly frivolous topics (the Oscars), and tried to branch out from the lonely perch of literary fiction to try her hand in the overcrowded field of pop culture commentator. Such maneuvers have been successfully attempted before by Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, etc.

Readers with a heavy bent towards nostalgia and a yearning for simpler times—and people—will enjoy the restrained pleasures of Brooklyn, the sixth novel by Irish writer Colm Toibin. Written in a style that does not call attention itself, much like the novel’s main character, Eilis Lacey, Brooklyn tells the story of an immigrant’s journey to a new world at the end of World War II. Eilis, a sheltered girl from the small town of Enniscorthy, is sponsored by Father Flood, a priest who traverses back and forth from America to the Old Country, to find lodging and employment for Irish girls in New York City’s borough of churches. Leaving behind her older sister Rose, a golf-playing bookkeeper, and her widowed mother, Eilis gets a job at a women’s clothing store on Fulton Street in the days when it was the Fifth Avenue of Brooklyn, and studies bookkeeping at night at Brooklyn College.