So here is what I said about Colm Toibin's Brooklyn immediately after I read it:
A quieter book than Toibin's acclaimed The Master, with the polar opposite of Henry James as the lead character--an exasperatingly passive young woman named Eilis, who dreams of nothing more than a steady bookkeeping job. I liked it more than that description might suggest--it's beautifully written, and I liked Eilis even though I did want to shake her sometimes. But very slight. It's a little like a lesser Alice Munro story writ large.
A lukewarm reaction indeed. And it is tempting to conclude that Toibin's slim new novel is just another in this year's series of disappointing minor offerings from gifted writers (I'm thinking of Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor, for example, or Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes). It is certainly not as ambitious as Toibin's novel about Henry James, The Master, which many believe should have won the 2004 Booker Prize instead of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. (I didn't think either book compared to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.)
But unlike Sag Harbor and Nocturnes, Brooklyn has stuck with me. I think it's somewhat deeper than it appears on the surface. Tonally, I continue to think it is very much like an Alice Munro story; it leaves behind that same whiff of elegiac wistfulness. But I also think, in retrospect, that reducing it to "lesser Munro" is unfair to Toibin. Eilis is a remarkably complex character, which I think can be obscured by her very passivity. She's exasperating because she seems to take so little initiative, to be almost uninterested in the course of her own life, but she does feel like a real person. Then, too, the minor characters--her sister, her mother, but especially Miss Kelly--feel vivid and real as well. I think the one exception here is Tony, who is something of a "Marty Stu" character. He doesn't seem to have any real flaws, and I think making him so obviously a better choice than Jim is a misstep on Toibin's part.
Of course, like all of Toibin's work, it is gracefully written:
Eilis felt like a child when the doctor would come to the house, her mother listening with cowed respect. It was Rose's silence that was new to her; she looked at her now, wanting her sister to ask a question or make a comment, but Rose appeared to be in a sort of dream. As Eilis watched her, it struck her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance.
Brooklyn is another historical, like The Children's Book and so many other entries on this year’s longlist, but because it is not so stuffed with names and dates its setting never feels oppressive, and I never felt that slightly guilty confusion I experienced when reading The Children's Book. Brooklyn wears its milieu lightly, and is all the more absorbing because of that. And it is absorbing, despite its slightness.
And then there's the ending. It's a frustrating ending, particularly because you want to see some growth in Eilis, some ability to choose rather than to be chosen for--and you don't see that. But it's not inconsistent, either with Eilis's character or with the tone of the book.
In a hundred years, will Brooklyn be regarded as a major work of the early 21st century? Will it be read at all? Well, who knows, really, but I doubt it. It really isn't, in my opinion, as good as The Master. But it's certainly a stronger book, I think, than I initially gave it credit for being. It's certainly not impossible that it will make my personal shortlist--although I still have a lot of reading to do. And I think it will certainly make the official shortlist; in fact, the more I think about it, the more I expect to see Brooklyn as the winner of the whole shebang. I'd rather see Wolf Hall or The Wilderness, but Toibin just might be the sentimental favorite of the judges.
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