The interview with Irish writer Colm Toibin in a recent New York Times Magazine intrigued me enough to want to pick up a copy of his new novel Brooklyn. At this very moment you are most likely thinking, how many more books could possibly exploit the Brooklyn motif? Just do a search on Amazon and you will see we already have A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Motherless Brooklyn, Brooklyn: A State of Mind, Brooklyn Was Mine, Nothing Was Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, I Live in Brooklyn (one of my daughter's favorite children's books) and now the rather minimalist if not blandly titled novel, Brookyn.
I admit I've taken a shine to the author not only because we've sprung from the same freckled gene pool, but also because his book is set in Cobble Hill the neighborhood where my family and Alex from the Real Housewives of Manhattan now reside. Coincidence? Maybe. If you actually had time to read the interview, you would find that Toibin takes the journalist on a little walking tour of Cobble Hill. He skips right by CVS to point out emeralds such as Staubitz butcher shop and Sam's Chop House--small businesses that were established in the 1950s, the time period in which his novel is set.
Like the author, Brooklyn's protagonist, Ellis Lacey (pronounce Eye-lish), is as Irish as they come. And she faces challenges consistent with Toibin's central theme: a wistfulness about home that is tinged with the knowledge that the ideal no longer exists. Or worse yet, never really existed at all. For Toibin, that home is, of course, Ireland. But he is also homesick for something far more intimate: a sense of family. Toibin never enjoyed a particularly close relationship with his parents and the emotionally distant mother is a pervasive theme throughout his novels. But healing past hurts in a therapeutic fashion just isn't Toibin's style. His rather comical explanation gave me pause. I think arriving home and accusing your mother of things when you’re in your 30s and she’s in her 60s or 70s is not something you should do. People are getting older, they have enough on their minds without their children arriving in states of hysteria or accusation.
Are you suddenly feeling terribly guilty?
I was also charmed by Toibin's romantic description of an Irish face in the interview: Someone whose eyes are soft but his jaw is hard, who can look very stubborn, who can remain silent for a very long time, who's capable also of resentments, who's never owned anything and is happier looking at the horizons than other possessions.
Okay, so Toibin can lay it on pretty thick. But would you expect anything less from a writer that has the Times journalist meet him at Sunday mass before he gives an interview?
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