Unspoken beauty

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This article was published 25/05/2024 (827 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A knock on the door changes the life of Eilis Fiorello, taking her back to Ireland and the choices she made more than 20 years ago.

In this worthy followup to his award-winning 2009 novel Brooklyn, Irish writer Colm Tóibín once again proves himself a master of silence and sadness, exploring ordinary lives with steady sympathy and deep understanding.

Since the events of Brooklyn, Eilis has made a life with her husband Tony on Long Island, where they live with their two children in the same suburban enclave as Tony’s parents and brothers.

The self-contained Eilis occasionally feels like the odd woman out in this close, noisy Italian family, who view “her interest in privacy and staying apart as something Irish.”

A man who arrives at Eilis’s door brings news that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child. While she’s dealing with that discovery, Eilis learns that Tony’s formidable mother, Francesca, wants to bring the child into their family. In response, Eilis travels to Enniscorthy, the small Irish town she left in in 1951 as an 18-year-old.

(One doesn’t need to have read Brooklyn to understand Long Island — Tóibín artfully reprises its main events — but familiarity with the former will make the latter more affecting and resonant.)

The town has changed only incrementally since the 1950s. After years in America, often feeling set apart by her Irishness, Eilis finds some comfort in its familiarity. But she also feels the constraints of its “enclosed, watched-over spaces” and its whispered undertows of gossip and censure (“Sure, everyone knows everything,” says her brother Martin).

Amid these currents of secretiveness and social shame, Eilis once again encounters Jim Farrell, the man she left behind two decades ago. He has a secret — one that echoes Eilis’s own secret in Brooklyn — and the two come to another turning point, one that is now complicated by midlife responsibilities and regrets.

Dealing with characters whose motivations and feelings are so often unknown to each other and even to themselves, Tóibín still manages to beautifully evoke their inner lives — with an emphasis on “inner,” since so much of what goes on in Long Island remains unspoken. Even when he yearns to reach out, for example, Jim finds himself struck silent: “There was nothing to say, or nothing that was easy or simple, nothing that he could find words for now.”

Tóibín, fortunately, can find words. His prose is lucid, economical and understated but still freighted with deep feeling and meaning. He approaches his characters with clear-eyed honesty and rueful tenderness, even mustering some generosity for Eilis’s comically negative and withholding mother. “It’s hard to know what to make of her sometimes,” says one of Eilis’s brothers, with good reason.

And while one doesn’t usually think of Tóibín as a plot guy — he tends to be much more concerned with mood and tone — as the novel moves to its conclusion, he turns out to be a dab hand at storytelling. The final pages stack up secrets and delays, miscommunications and mistimings to almost unbearable emotional effect.

Moving and evocative, Long Island finds heartrending beauty in what’s left unsaid.

Alison Gillmor writes on pop culture for the Free Press.