Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on May 7, 2024

I’m not always a fan of domestic drama, but I’m a huge fan of Colm Tóibín. He writes about couples in crisis with honesty rather than melodrama. Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn, a continuation of that story of relationship uncertainty in the context of cultural clashes.

Readers of Brooklyn (or viewers of the movie) will recall that Eilis Lacey emigrated from Ireland to America, found a job, endured homesickness, met and married a young Italian man named Tony who was working as a plumber, returned to Ireland to attend her sister’s funeral, and found herself torn between remaining in Ireland (where both familiarity and a young Irishman named Jim Farrell appealed to her) and returning to her husband in Brooklyn. She decides in favor of her marriage, prompted in part by local gossip that makes it impossible to pretend she is single.

Twenty years later, Jim owns a pub in Enniscorthy. He is having a clandestine dalliance with Nancy Sheridan, a widow who owns a nearby chip shop. He has finally worked his way around to proposing, more or less, when Eilis comes back to visit her mother. Notwithstanding his relationship with Nancy, Jim cannot help revisiting the sense of loss he felt when Eilis left for America twenty years earlier.

During those twenty years, Tony and Eilis accomplished Tony’s dream of moving to Long Island. They built a home that was surrounded by the homes of Tony’s siblings and parents. Tony and Eilis had two kids and apparently had a steady marriage until it was rocked by news that Tony made a customer pregnant while fixing her leaking pipes. The customer’s husband wants nothing to do with Tony’s baby and threatens to leave it on Eilis’ doorstep after it is born. Eilis also wants nothing to do with the baby. She refuses to raise it and refuses to go along with Tony’s mother’s plan to raise the child.

After giving Tony an ultimatum, Eilis returns to Ireland to visit her aging mother, who has become no less intolerable during Eilis’ absence. She plans to have her children join her for her mother’s birthday celebration.

Eilis will, of course, encounter Jim. The novel’s drama comes from the choices Eilis must make — return to America and Tony, stay in Ireland with Jim, or return to America with Jim. Jim hasn’t stopped thinking about Eilis since she returned to America, but would he abandon his marriage plans with Nancy to be with Eilis? Would Eilis leave her family in America to be with Jim? The novel builds tension as it seems inevitable that Eilis and/or Nancy will learn that Jim has not been honest with either of them.

This sounds like a soap opera plot, and maybe it is, but Long Island is a character-driven novel that takes a deep dive into personalities that have been shaped by culture and family. Tóibín addresses the restrained emotional turmoil of his characters without resorting to contrivances.

The novel explores the relationship histories of Jim and Nancy as well as their relationship with each other. In a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else, they have been surprisingly successful at keeping their late-night visits a secret. Yet secrets will out. Jim doesn’t want Nancy to know that she is his backup plan if he can’t convince Eilis to leave Tony. Nor does he want Eilis to know that he is sleeping with Nancy. In such a small community, is there any hope that Jim’s secrets will not be discovered?

Jim’s secrecy is motivated in part by the knowledge that Nancy will be subject to gossip if it becomes known that he left her for Eilis. The destructive nature of gossip and the impossibility of keeping secrets in a small Irish village was an important theme in Brooklyn that Tóibín reprises in the sequel.

Tóibín also illustrates how people in relationships attempt to manipulate each other. Nancy, for example, wants to sell the chip shop and become a homemaker after she marries Jim, but she schemes to influence Jim with subtle suggestions until he believes the idea is his own. At the same time, characters are afraid to say what they are thinking, perhaps for fear of another person’s reaction, perhaps because they fear the consequences of speaking their desires into reality. The story ends with a dramatic act of manipulation that different readers might judge in different ways.

The novel’s other key relationship is Eilis’ with her mother. For twenty years, her mother never acknowledged the pictures that Eilis sent of her children. When she arrives in Ireland, her mother doesn’t want to hear anything about her life in America. Yet Eilis’ mother has always nurtured a hidden pride in the grandchildren she never met, even if she has bottled up her emotions and refuses to share them with her daughter. After Eilis’ mother meets her grandchildren, she believes it is her right to turn her daughter’s life upside down.

My first takeaway from Long Island in conjunction with Brooklyn is that every choice we make gives birth to a potential regret about the choice we didn’t make. Or if not regret, at least curiosity about the path life might have taken if we had chosen differently.

My second takeaway is that no matter how we try to make choices that shape our lives, other people make their own choices that alter the course we have planned. We may or may not have the courage or strength to resist those choices. The choices made by others may take on an irresistible force. The inability to take complete control of our destiny might turn out to be a surprising joy or a dreadful peril, but either way, Long Island makes clear that it is a reality of life. As always, Tóibín’s powerful illustration of great truths makes Long Island a captivating novel.

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The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on September 7, 2021

The line between fiction and nonfiction becomes fuzzy when writers make characters out of real people. In some novels, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the character is modeled upon, but does not purport to tell the life of, a real person. Mann based his novel on the composer Arnold Schoenberg but gave the character a different name and attributed his musical creativity to a pact with the devil.

Colm Tóibín writes about Doctor Faustus and Schoenberg’s reaction to that novel in The Magician, Tóibín’s own blend of fiction and biographical fact. Tóibín does not disguise his subject; the story’s protagonist is Thomas Mann and the story hews closely to the details of Mann’s life.

Writers who essentially write a biography in the form of a novel run a couple of risks. First, they are constrained by historical fact, which limits the ability to let imagination take flight, as Mann did when he turned Schoenberg into someone other than Schoenberg. Second, if they choose a subject who is not particularly interesting, the novel is likely to be dull. R.J. Gadney stumbled across the first of those barriers to compelling fiction in Albert Einstein Speaking, turning Einstein’s life into a dry checklist of events without ever bringing Einstein to life. Mann is a literary icon but not an exciting one, creating the risk that a book about his life might be dull. Fortunately, Tóibín recognized and overcame that risk.

Given Mann’s reserved and scholarly nature, it would be difficult to make Mann’s the story of Mann's life lively. Tóibín defeated that problem by surrounding Mann with colorful people (including Mann’s children and their varied marital or sex partners), by giving the reader occasional glimpses of Mann’s attraction to young males, and by focusing on the political issues that played an unwelcome role in Mann’s life. Much of the story’s intrigue derives from Mann’s internal struggle with his early embrace of German nationalism and his later recognition that the nationalism embraced by the Nazi party was antithetical to his belief in freedom, democracy, and humanity. Tóibín suggests that Mann was often caught in the middle, between those (including his children) who criticized him for being insufficiently anti-fascist, and those (including the FBI) who regarded Mann and his children as dangerously liberal in their advocacy of anti-fascism. Mann did eventually speak out against Hitler and did so passionately, but for the most part he just wanted to be left alone so he can read and write.

Tóibín portrays Mann as a person whose nature, shaped by German culture, is circumspect and a bit ponderous, a man who has playful moments but prefers the solitude that allows him to think deeply about the human condition and to reveal his thoughts in novels rather than conversation. Although we learn the background to Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Tóibín spends little time on the content of Mann’s works, focusing instead on the act of creation, the moments of inspiration, the mulling of artistic choices, and the hours spent committing words to paper.

Mann’s confidence in his art contrasts with (as Tóibín sees it) his insecurity as a public figure. Mann transformed his political thinking after the First World War, viewing German’s defeat as a lesson that the nation needed to internalize. He feared the direction Germany was taking as its population embraced Hitler, and then feared for himself and his family as he moved to other European countries and eventually to America. Yet at what point and to what degree he should speak out against Hitler was a question that troubled him, although not as much as it troubled his brother and children. Mann is Germany’s most celebrated writer during Hitler’s rise, just as Einstein (who makes a brief appearance in the story) is Germany’s most celebrated scientist. Both are men who could speak with intellectual and moral authority. Some in America advised Mann not to advocate for America’s participation in the war, lest he jeopardize his relationship with Roosevelt, while most of his family demanded that he make his opinions known. Tóibín’s depiction of Mann’s internal struggle is one of the novel’s highlights, as are the political machinations of the State Department and FBI in their fevered belief that intellectual freedom and nontraditional sexuality must be suppressed in the name of restraining communism and preserving crabbed American notions of morality. American hospitality turns out to be a fickle thing and Mann winds up in Switzerland after the war is over.

As envisioned by Tóibín, Mann is never quite happy with the person he has become. He “wished he were a different sort of writer, less concerned with the details of the world and more with larger, more eternal questions.” He isn’t certain whether his novels evoked emotion in same way that musical compositions express yearning. His own yearnings were confined to diaries (presumably a primary source that informed Tóibín’s understanding of Mann). For a time, Mann feared that his private writings would fall into the hands of Nazis who would use them to destroy his career. His emotions are so intensely private that they are only expressed in novels. Even his warm regard for his children is never spoken. By the novel’s end, when he decides it would be too painful to attend the funeral of his oldest son, he learns from a letter that the feelings of adulation expressed by the general public are not shared by his surviving children.

Tóibín is a meticulous researcher. I can only assume The Magician is grounded in fact, even if some of those facts are revealed in imagined conversations. Whether or not Tóibín’s interpretation of Mann is accurate, his skill at crafting characters in depth is fully displayed. The bottled-up Mann, who often responds to conflict with silence or a conspiratorial glance at his wife, is presented in credible detail as someone who can’t reconcile his emotional conflicts, who can only give full expression to his feelings by attributing them to characters in his novels. Mann is reticent but comfortable discussing matters of intellect; he is hopeless at discussing matters of the heart or loins. He is capable of revising his opinions — in some ways, he becomes a new person before the war, just as his post-war homeland becomes a new country — but he cannot change his deeply ingrained inability to express himself emotionally. He understands and regrets this flaw, but he seems incapable of addressing it. Instead of trying, he buries himself in his writing, the only task that gives him comfort.

I’ve always preferred the flights of imagination that inspire pure fiction, as opposed to the “based on a true story/actual person” brand of fiction. Writers who want to enhance a biography with fiction are constrained by the factual frame that contains their subject. Tóibín has written some true masterpieces of fiction. The Magician and The Master (a similar novel about Henry James) could be regarded as masterpieces of the subgenre of biographical fiction (or whatever it might be called). For my taste, The Magician doesn’t have the wow factor of Let the Great World Spin, but it is an impressive achievement.

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The Shortest Day by Colm Tóibín

Published digitally by Amazon on November 3, 2020

“The Shortest Day” is a short story that is easily consumed in less than an hour. The story is available through Amazon as a “Kindle edition.”

Professor O’Kelly, an archeologist, has spent his career investigating an ancient burial chamber at Newgrange. As a scholar, O’Kelly focuses on facts supported by evidence. He does not speculate about things he cannot prove. When people ask him about spirits of the dead people who were buried in the tomb, he reminds them that spirits are beyond the remit of an archeologist.

What O’Kelly does not know is that spirits do dwell within the chamber. The spend their afterlives telling each other stories. Only one spirit, a woman named Dalc, is able to add new information to their collective knowledge because only she can leave the tomb and roam around in the world.

Once a year, on the winter solstice, a beam of light illuminates the chamber. The spirits are sustained by the light — it renews their energy — but they do not want the outside world to invade their resting place. “We need to be separate from the mortal world,” a spirit argues. “No one ever planned that this sacred space might be shared with anyone.”

In her only contact with a mortal, motivated by fear that archeologists would discover the beam of light, Dalc told a villager that the annual illumination of the chamber is a secret “that does not belong to the world.” Dalc explained that “we must all know our place in the great scheme of things. We respect mystery and silence and spirit.”

Dalc made the villager swear to keep people away from the tomb on the solstice. The villager took her vow seriously. While current villagers are aware that the winter solstice is the one day the tomb is not to be disturbed, the secret has not spread beyond the community. Until, that is, a drunken villager rambled about it while O’Kelly was visiting a local tavern.

When O’Kelly chooses the solstice for one of his visits, the villagers fret that the spirits will be disturbed. By the story’s end, the reader will be invited to ponder the impact of O’Kelly’s discovery.

The foundation of this story is true, in that Michael O’Kelly did discover the phenomenon in 1967. Why the tomb was designed to illuminate on the shortest day of the year is unknown. The illumination clearly required careful planning and ingenious design. According to the Newgrange website (the place is a tourist attraction now), locals did tell stories about the annual lighting of the chamber, although they didn’t reveal exactly when it would happen.

I always admire Colm Tóibín’s prose and his ability to create atmosphere. Like all of Tóibín’s work, the story is interesting and thought provoking. What thoughts Tóibín intended to provoke is something of a mystery to me. Perhaps, as an Irish writer, he couldn’t resist writing a ghost story and that’s all there is to it. But I have struggled to reconcile the spirits’ fear with the story’s ending, which seems to suggest that the fears were groundless. If the lesson learned by the fretful spirits is supposed to teach a larger lesson, it eludes me. Surely not all fears are groundless.

O’Kelly’s lucky discovery enriched the living by revealing an amazing bit of ancient engineering. I suspect Tóibín’s point is that unscientific fears harbored by villagers should give way to the revelations of science. That interpretation might permit the light illuminating the chamber to be seen as light that chases away the dark fears of superstition. But maybe not. Maybe I’m only projecting my own frustration with people who reject reason and science. In any event, I like the story. Maybe it’s my dimness that prevents me from fully appreciating it, but the fact that a story is challenging isn’t a reason not to recommend it.

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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on October 30, 2018

Colm Tóibín begins Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know with an essay that melds the literary history of Dublin with the city’s sociopolitical history. Wilde and Yeats and Joyce and Beckett and Stoker and Shaw and many other writers and poets are still alive in the city’s memory, still called to mind by certain streets and structures. From that stroll, Tóibín journeys to three essays about “prodigal fathers” who, at least for a time, called Dublin home.

Sir William Wilde was the father of Oscar Wilde, but Tóibín begins the essay with a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s two-year imprisonment at Reading Gaol, during which Wilde wrote De Profundis in the form of an angry letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father, the Marquess of Queensbury, played an instrumental role in causing Wilde’s sodomy conviction. We eventually learn about Oscar’s father William, a doctor, archeologist, statistician, and man of learning who straddled England and Ireland.

William’s life was at least tangentially touched by the longstanding conflict between Dubliners who advocated independence and Home Rule and those who opposed separation from England. William is almost tangential to the essay, which tells us at least as much about William’s friends and acquaintances as it does about William. Much of the essay’s interest comes from its description of a time in which “revolutionary fervor in Ireland was ill-fated, half-hearted or part of a literary rather than a serious political culture.” William’s life is a good deal less interesting than Oscar’s, although he did manage to work a scandal into his High Society life involving a scorned and vindictive lover.

John Yeats is the most interesting of the three fathers that Toibin profiles. Toibin compares John to the father of the novelist Henry James: “they sought self-realization through art and general inquiry.” (John earns a gold star from me for his belief that Henry James’ novels are unbearably tedious.) Unfortunately, self-realization doesn’t pay the bills.

To the dismay of his wife, John Yeats abandoned the study of law to pursue a career as an artist. He was never satisfied with his paintings and generally began them anew each day, a habit that impaired his ability to earn money. He could only paint portraits of people he liked, another “infirmity of will” (his son’s assessment) that made it difficult to earn a living.

As a father, John Yeats was “exasperating but also inspirational.” John seems to have been most notable for wielding the Irish gift of gab. He lived the last 15 years of his life in New York, writing splendid letters and gaining American admirers while depending on his famous son to satisfy his debts. Tóibín admires John's ability to write “sentences of startling beauty,” but it is difficult to know what to make of him. John Yeats felt a passionate longing to be something more than he ever became; he lived in imagination more than reality. In the end, his correspondence reveals him to be too self-centered to be a successful father, husband, or lover.

The discussion of James Joyce’s father differs from the first two portraits. We often see John Stanislaus Joyce as James Joyce fictionalized him in stories and novels. In actual life, John ran up unmanageable debt (a common theme among three men Tóibín examines), had a serious problem with alcohol, and was a miserable father. Toibin gleans these facts from various sources, including My Brother’s Keeper by James’ brother Stanislaus, whose anger at their father is palpable.

Yet James, unlike his brother, resisted the temptation to be angry, finding ways to reimagine his father in his fiction. James’ stories often depict his father as his friends see him, not as his children knew him. John is portrayed in Ulysses as Simon Dedalus, “a complex figure of moods, an unsettled rather than a solid presence in the book.” That seems to be an accurate description of all three men.

I’m not sure what this volume tell us, except that difficult fathers sometimes produce sons who are capable of literary brilliance. Tóibín has demonstrated his own literary genius over the years, and while this work of nonfiction doesn’t display the depth of his fiction (it’s difficult to be stuck with facts when imagination offers a richer environment), it is worth reading for its insight into a time and place that produced such vital writers.

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House of Names by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on May 9, 2017

House of Names is a retelling of a Greek myth surrounding Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Elektra, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Cassandra. You can’t beat Greek mythology for good stories that teach powerful lessons. That’s why the myths endure. Colm Tóibín adds characterization and detail to this powerful story of the ultimate dysfunctional family as a father plots against a daughter, a wife against her husband, and children against their mother.

The first section is narrated by Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon, who desires revenge because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to placate the goddess Artemis. Tóibín portrays Clytemnestra as a woman who understands politics (she is, after all, the wife of a king), a strong woman in a male-dominated world who manipulates people and power to attain her vengeful ends.

The next section follows her son Orestes after he has been taken by the soldiers who formerly served Agamemnon. Years and a number of adventures later, Orestes is on his way home, and the focus shifts to Elektra, who has clearly learned the art of manipulation from the mother she despises. Later the perspective shifts among the three key characters.

The story addresses a number of themes, including pretense (refuse to acknowledge your crimes, and it’s like you didn’t commit them); female subjugation and empowerment; the madness that comes with power and from being abused by power; the whispers and secrets that define a government; the impossibility of trust in a family that is built on betrayal; the cruelty of expectations; the consequences of revenge; how love blossoms from need; the burden of being a father’s son; and the evil that people do in the name of serving their god(s).

The gods, in fact, have had their day by the novel’s end. Leander, who becomes Orestes’ friend and later a conqueror of sorts, announces, in reference to the gods, that “we will get nothing more from them. Their time is over.” Shedding blood to satisfy deities is in the past, Leander thinks, but killing and maiming in the name of a deity is, sadly enough, still with us. I wonder if that might have been one of the points Tóibín intended the reader to think about.

Tóibín does justice to the myth in this embroidered retelling of a classic story. It is a new version of an old tale, and some details are clearly of Tóibín’s invention. Working from the strong foundation built by the likes of Euripides and Sophocles, Tóibín relates the story in graceful language that should appeal to a modern audience. By preserving a sense of detachment, he also avoids the melodrama that could so easily mar a story of such intensity. By any standard, House of Names is a compelling work of fiction by a masterful storyteller, backed by masterful storytellers from ancient times.

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