"Brooklyn" by Colm Toibin

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. She lives in a rooming house with the wily Mrs. Kehoe, another immigrant, who rents out rooms to other colleens, one of which aptly describes Eilis as a “living saint.” Not quite. When Eilis meets a studly Italian named, predictably, Tony, she learns how to keep a secret or two.

Employing third-person omniscience to describe Eilis’ adjustments to her new life, and occasionally dipping into her consciousness to render her homesickness, Toibin hits all the right, heartwarming buttons on his nostalgic beat. There are trips, of course, to Coney Island, and Dodgers games at Ebbets Field; readers who remember either of those places in their heyday can supply their own memories to flesh out the characters’ experiences. The narrative distance gives the novel an even tone that makes it go down as easy as Milk of Magensia, but this isn’t always what Brooklyn needs. With its lack of narrative tension, momentum becomes a problem.

As a character, the excessively self-effacing Eilis seems most fully alive when she is with Tony. Then, she is liberated from merely observing the world to living in it, displaying a charming sense of humor and Irish sarcasm. Her awakening sexuality seems to rouse the author, too. Toibin’s vivid account of her deflowering takes the reader by surprise and succeeds in finally making his heroine seem eminently relatable, not someone embroidered on a doily.

A subplot where a lesbian co-worker critiques Eilis as she tries on bathing suits and pats her rump often enough to memorize its contours has potential for some spicy conflict, but, like many things in this book, such as Eilis’ instant attraction to Tony’s brother, Toibin shies away from it.

Brooklyn is divided into four parts, and then broken down into loosely strung episodes. Through a plot contrivance, Eilis ends up back in Enniscorthy, where the lure of the familiar exerts an unexpected power over her. Suddenly she doubts everything she thought she liked about her new life. It’s clear her mother wants her to stay in Ireland. It’s clear that her friends want her to stay. But can Eilis really go home again?  In a novel that barely ruffles its heroine’s feathers, Eilis’s final conflict seems rushed and unearned.