Dennis Haritou: Thanks very much, Mr. Toibin, for helping me with my reaction to your novel, Brooklyn. I found the title enigmatic. That might seem strange to most people…it’s about Brooklyn right? But if readers were expecting some kind of James Michener-like geographical novel: a sentimental, pop-culture exposition of a place in the guise of a family saga, that’s not what they’re getting in Brooklyn. It reminded me more of a quest with a very ambivalent grail as its reward. Brooklyn looms up like magic, a paradigm of the unfamiliar, full of strange promise, the promise of new possibilities, even of a new identity. But also it’s full of shadows…since there is a price exacted for its rewards…a need to change who you are. That’s seems just as scary as it is a golden opportunity. It’s a light and dark reading experience. I wonder if that’s the way you wanted me to read it?
CT: I was maybe thinking of how Chinatown appears in the movie ‘Chinatown’, enigmatically but powerfully. But it looms larger than that in the book. Everything depends on it. But it is not a book about a place, but about a psychology.
DH: Brooklyn doesn’t start there but in a family within a town in Ireland. There’s a wonderful gift in your writing…in the opening passages…please forgive my prosaic simile…but it’s like pouring pancake batter into a hot pan…the pancake appears in the pan all-of-a-piece…seemingly, all at once. You set a scene that way….I was present immediately in Eilis’ home, on her street, among her family and neighbors. There’s a communitarian ethos in your story whether the setting is Ireland or Brooklyn. Your characters are always part of the group and part of what they are is what the community thinks and feels. That’s one of the fascinating aspects of reading Brooklyn as the reader wonders whether Eilis is in the process of changing her group identification when she emigrates. I wonder if this palpable conviction: that the community is inside you as well as you being inside it; reflects your experience growing up. I wonder what you think about this dilemma of being rooted in one place and then choosing another place?
CT: I tried to write the story down without any bows to technical innovation. I tried to make it seem simple on the surface, but it is filled with secrecy and a sort of inwardness. I come from a small town in Ireland and I am aware of its ability both to enclose and alienate. But mainly I had to concentrate on Eilis, make her innocent in certain ways and not in others, intelligent in some ways and not in others, loyal in some ways and not in others. Everything is seen through her eyes, but it was important that the reader would start knowing her better than she knows herself.
DH: I’ve implied that Eilis chooses to emigrate to Brooklyn…but she’s really sort of pushed into it. And there is your canny sense that she is frightened and would rather back off. Her prime facilitator is Father Flood, priest of the Brooklyn parish where Eilis will go to live. I loved this character. I especially loved his deftness in interfering…or care-taking. Father Flood helps arrange Eilis’ move across the ocean and helps her find accommodation. He pulls strings for college admission. When Eilis confides to her older sister, Rose, in Ireland, that she has a boyfriend, Father Flood…three thousand miles away…finds out about it and checks the lad out. It reminded me of ancient history…when the old Roman Empire collapsed, it was the clergy that attempted to preserve the law and letters and care for the community. It looks like they were still doing it in Brooklyn and Ireland in the 1950′s. Do you take this kind of role for granted? Is it what you grew up with? Is it an exercise in nostalgia?
CT: The novel was written in 2007 and 2008 when the role of a priest in any community was under question. Thus not to give him a sexual role in the novel was a serious decision. He remains enigmatic, almost like a magician. I have no interest in nostalgia, but rather was concerned not to indulge in anachronism by dramatizing a contemporary drama for a priest, but allowing him to be old-fashioned.
DH: Brooklyn seems fresh out of the mold in your portrayal: your passages on the afternoon spent at Ebbets Field watching the Dodgers play…brilliantly using it to showcase the Italian family that Eilis comes to know…the remarkable department store, Bartocci’s, where Eilis works; where Miss Fortini, the supervisor, will watch carefully to make sure her employees are smiling at the customers, Mrs. Kehoe’s boarding house with its crew of hang-up driven residents.
There is a sense in Brooklyn that in the telling of a story, every character…no matter how small their part, has their proper role to play and is portrayed in the round and allowed their dignity. Storytelling becomes the presentation of character, cast with a wide net, and you really seem to care about them all. Is that how you feel about your characters?
CT: I had been reading Jane Austin a lot and teaching her books, and also George Eliot, and was alert to how much minor characters matter, especially if they have something funny or enlightening to say. I did relish moments of the book, and loved putting words into old Mrs Kehoe’s mouth. I also had a phrase from William Blake in my head all the time – ‘Men are sick with love’ and the book is filled with men sick with love. I loved the idea of men as helpless creatures and women having a strange power.
DH: Brooklyn takes place in the 1950′s. Singing in the Rain and Belle of New York, two popular movies of the era, are playing in Manhattan. The period feel seems comprehensive. But I was pulled up short by your treatment of sexuality, which was contemporary…more explicit than would have been customary in most fiction of the time. There’s a wonderful ambivalence in your fiction. When you honor the past in such a sensitive way, as you did in The Master as well, there is never any doubt that you are not writing retrograde fiction. Your time-sense is as contemporary as it is aware that there is a past…it’s a doubled vision. Is that how you intended it? Are you also writing about us…our time…when you write about the past?
CT: Oh dear! I hoped it was the 1950s, with a mixture of sex and guilt. The priest is not sexualized. They go to confession after they have had sex. Tony agrees not to have sex until they are properly married. I think I am right about some of this – the mixture of things – that there was much more sex in the 1950s that we give the decade credit for.
DH: Life is not a saccharine experience. There’s always someone left behind when the hero goes off to be happy,
clutching the glittering prize. Brooklyn, both the story and the place, are wonderful. But how do you reconcile so much success with so much necessary grief? Is life nothing more than a permanent stand-off…or do we really, like the Dodgers, win something?
clutching the glittering prize. Brooklyn, both the story and the place, are wonderful. But how do you reconcile so much success with so much necessary grief? Is life nothing more than a permanent stand-off…or do we really, like the Dodgers, win something?
CT: I don’t have any ability to generalize so I cannot really answer this question. You would have to ask a philosopher or a priest. I am not sure I have a vision or a version of things which makes any sense. I write novels. And thus am concerned with the precise feelings of characters, what they see, what they do at very exact and given moments. I try to make them as interesting and ambiguous as possible.
DH: Thanks Colm, very much, and thanks for Brooklyn.
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