A lighthouse called home

The silence from where Tóibín’s writing emerges has grown and flowered into a stunning awakening with his new novel. Long Island is Colm Tóibín’s 11th novel. It is a story of failed chances, subdued silences, and passions that always remain at the threshold. None but Colm Tóibín could write a novel such as this one in contemporary times.

In Long Island, the readers are brought back to New York where they had left off with Eilis Lacey’s arrival to her husband in the 2009 novel Brooklyn. It’s been 20 years since we last saw Eilis leave her Irish home and come to New York in the early 1950s. Now, she is settled with her two children and her in-laws are living in the same compound. She hasn’t visited Ireland but keeps writing to her mother who is inching toward 80. Eilis wants to be there for her son Larry and see her daughter Rosella off to university. But things come to a standstill when a man appears at her door in Long Island and tells her that his wife is impregnated by Eilis’s husband. Eilis is troubled by the idea of another woman’s child entering the sanctity of her household. She packs her bag and decides to take a break from her life in America. In Ireland, she realises she has left too many hearts wounded.

I have never been this excited for a sequel in a while. In 2023, when it was announced that another half of Eilis’s story would be out, I picked up Brooklyn and read it in a day or two. Eilis’s story as a young 20-something affected me as did this sequel in which she is in her 40s. While she was once vulnerable, weak and miserable being away from home, she has now built her own home and is freely sharing her opinions on the Vietnam War, Nixon, and that she would not put up with her mother-in-law’s control over her household. But time and again, Tóibín reminds the reader of Eilis’s charm that stems from her being vulnerable.

I found myself going back to the homesickness Eilis endured as a young girl who was now again homesick despite the home she had built in Long Island. With writing as simple and lyrical as the author is known for, I could not help but be surprised how subtly I had begun reimagining homesickness all over again which I thought I was past after the last book.

Tóibín, through his measured silences, reminds us that for immigrants, the homesickness never ceases. Eilis still has her Irish accent intact. She is constantly reminded of her estranged identity between the Italians and Americans. So much so that she is asked to stay away from the family’s Sunday lunches. Home, Tóibín insists, is integral, no matter where the body travels. This idea of home and homesickness that Marilynne Robinson conjures in Home And Jack finds a beautiful resonance here. Not only do we find Eilis going home but Tóibín also takes his readers home by bringing in characters from the previous novels as easter eggs. 

Colm Tóibín is one of the rare male writers who knows how to write about women without making it obvious that it is from a man’s point of view. The women in his stories always find a way to be themselves, even if that comes with unsettling those around them. ‘Nancy was wringing out a dishcloth to clean the counter before she opened for business.’

This is how we are introduced to Nancy Sheridan — a woman defined by her dint of hard work and reputation. Nancy is Eilis’s friend in the present novel. She is a widow with three kids and one such woman besides the protagonist herself who leaves the reader bemused. Her presence is a clever trick on the author’s part to instil a mystery in this apparently domestic literary fiction.

The reader is constantly aware of things taking a wrong turn within the triangle of the three. It is this that clutches at the reader’s heart. I found myself biting my nails in anticipation of Nancy’s character changing. It made me gasp.

That’s the thing about Tóibín’s characters, the plot surrounding them doesn’t affect you as much as it is the characters, especially the so-called conservative, bashful, Irish women.

To me, excelling in the second novel of a series is not that hard. Lawrence’s Women In Love, Ferrante’s The Story Of A New Name, Robinson’s Home, Byatt’s Still Life, Coetzee’s The Schooldays Of Jesus, and Cusk’s Transit are some of my favourite second novels. These follow-ups do a good job of reminding the reader why they fell in love with the first book — to begin with — and then give them a little more to look forward to. Tóibín’s Long Island is now added to this list of my favourite second novels. It is a book whose mysterious silence will haunt me until I read something else by Tóibín.