Brooklyn is a myth. This may come as a surprise to the several million people who live there. In these parts, it is second only to Manhattan in glamor. But in coolness, it has the edge. You can no more take down a myth than you can pin an angel. Just as you think you may have a lock on it, it changes into something else and eludes your grasp. Like clouds, fairy tales, the reflection of the sky in a lake…or like beauty in your friends or strangers on the street…never the same from moment to moment…always metamorphosis is in the cards for the things that we love.
It is in that spririt that I am reacting to Brooklyn by Colm Toibin which is pubbing in early May from Scribner. Brooklyn is just one view of the angel. But it’s a beautiful angel.
As is appropriate for the location of any myth, Brooklyn starts somewhere else. You have to travel to get to the myth…like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Parsifal. But we start with the first words of the story: “Eilis Lacey”. She is our voyager.
Even the name sounds exotic to me. But it may be a common enough name in the town in Ireland where Eilis lives with her older, leadership-driven sister Rose and her widowed mother.
I admire the way Toibin immerses us in this Irish world immediately. We get the name of her street, that her sister is returning from a shopping trip to Dublin. We get the name of the store Rose shops in and we conclude that Rose can’t buy such fashionable stuff in her own neighborhood and that the family doesn’t have a lot money. Rose went especially for the sale. We also find out that Rose’s golf clubs are lying in the front hall, ready for use. This is all in the first paragraph of eight lines and there is more…but I can’t fit it all in my paragraph of eight lines the way Toibin can fit it in his.
Life in Ireland in the 50’s tends to curl back into itself…like a vine that gets tangled in knots because it has no where else to grow. Eilis is a whiz with numbers but it doesn’t look like she is going to get the chance to study for a business degree. She lands a clerk’s position in a bakery at a pittance of a wage dispensed by some old dragon lady who gives Eilis leftover stale bread to take home. But if you need the money to help out the family, it’s not such a bad deal.
There is a dense social circuit, neighbors and friends walking everywhere…that must seem exotic to most Americans. You can sense that Eilis is going to have as good a provincial life as anyone but you already know what it would consist of…no surprises…in that first paragraph you have already been told all about it.
But then Eilis finds herself grafted into 1950’s Brooklyn instead. You’ll have to read about that transition for yourself. But it reminded me of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Like Dorothy, Eilis encounters a lot of strangers along the way, most of whom turn out to be friendly. And if you want to attend a Dodgers game in Ebbets Field with baseball fans that you can really care about then you’ll love this novel.
There’s a wonderful cast of minor players with most of them having their hearts in the right place despite their flaws. There is the supervisior in the big Italian department store where Eilis works, Miss Fortini…, the landlady of the boarding house where she stays, Mrs. Kehoe, (we hardly, if ever, hear their first names), the lovely Italian family of the new man in her life, Tony….many more. I wanted to make a point of mentioning their names because they seem like real people. Mr. Toibin believes in the dignity of his characters. My favorite bit player is the biblically-named Father Flood, a priest of many resources, who keeps a watchful eye on his Brooklyn parish.
One interesting feature of this 50’s Brooklyn nostaglia is that it stops at the bedroom. A lot of this novel may read like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and it’s just as good, but the treatment of sexuality is 2009. This created an odd optical effect for me. You may think you’re within the atmosphere of Singing in the Rain or Belle of New York, two contemporary movies that are mentioned in Brooklyn, then you are brought up short by an erotic awareness that couldn’t have been discussed in a 50’s novel and that would have made Bennett Cerf pass out. This is a contemporary novel…don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s a quaint period piece. That goes for the story’s take on Brooklyn’s ethnic diversity as well.
Getting back to that Brooklyn angel…where is Eilis’s myth truly located? The choices that we make create the shadows that we don’t want to see, the streets that we never turned down, that would have created the lives that we never had, would haunt us if we paid any attention to them which we don’t. If Brooklyn is not a myth, then is Ireland the myth? Is the myth always on the other side of the ocean?
-DH
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