In 'Brooklyn,' the life of an Irish immigrant takes root

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, about a young Irish woman coming to New York in 1952, is one of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations.
How that happens is Toibin's triumph.

He employs no page-turning plot devices. The only touches of drama and suspense are saved until the end. By then, readers, at least those with patience, should be engrossed in the double life of Eilis Lacey, a small-town shopgirl who dreams of being a bookkeeper.

The novel is structured with a craftsman's-like symmetry.

The first 49 pages are set in Ireland or on the boat to America. Eilis emigrates alone after a visiting priest says: "Parts of Brooklyn are just like Ireland. They're full of Irish" but with decent jobs.

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The next 153 pages are set in Brooklyn, which Eilis discovers is a different world — for better and for worse.

The final 51 pages follow her back to Ireland after the death of a relative. There she has to choose between two men and two lives, one at home and one in America.

The writing is as restrained as Eilis, a keeper of secrets, who imagines that her family "knew so much ... that they could do everything except say out loud what it was they were thinking."

It's a classic American story about an immigrant's lonely, unspoken yearnings and about feeling "this was the only life she was going to have, a life away from home."

Back in Ireland, she feels "strangely as though she was two people," the one who had fallen in love in Brooklyn and "the other who was her mother's daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew."

Toibinn, who lives in Dublin and has just finished a semester as a visiting professor at Princeton, is a novelist, essayist and playwright. Twice he has been a finalist for the Britain's top literary prize, the Booker (for The Blackwater Lightship and The Master).

In Brooklyn he creates the purest form of fiction, a small world that employs few references to the real world. It transcends time and place. It leaves readers wondering if Eilis is making the right life for herself, the same question we all face.

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