Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn is charmless to a fault

Eilis Lacey is a young girl with a talent for accountancy who lives with her mother and sister in Enniscorthy, in post-war Ireland. Her life is suddenly upended when a visiting priest arranges for Eilis to migrate to America. After a nauseating voyage, she arrives in Brooklyn, negotiates the internal politics of her all-Irish boarding house, feels lonely, does well at work, takes evening classes, falls in love with a sincere, Dodgers-mad Italian-American and goes back home after a family tragedy. And if those bald biographical facts don’t quite mesmerise you, don’t expect to be devastated and moved by the way it all unfolds.

Colm Toibin, who has written critically lauded novels like Blackwater Lightship and The Master, specialises in an austere, held-in kind of writing that lets characters reveal themselves. But a technique like that needs compelling material — what might have succeeded when addressed to Henry James’ inner life (like in The Master) — just comes across as flat and feelingless when applied to this mundane story of migration and return. The novel sags with extraneous detail (14 pages about a seasickness) and unremarkable thoughts — Eilis’s disorientation on arrival, her wonder that in America her landlady keeps the heating on all night, and her gradual accommodation. While a couple of characters, like her sister Rose and her landlady Mrs Kehoe have intriguing depths, Eilis doesn’t seem to have a single out-of-place instinct.

Toibin’s show-rather-than-tell narrative works best in its handling of social interaction. At one point, the store where Eilis works, Bartocci’s, decides to “welcome coloured women as shoppers”. Eilis and the other salesgirls stare despite themselves, as two beautifully dressed middle-aged women walk in and inspect stockings. Nobody meets anyone’s eye, and the whole exercise is conducted in an atmosphere of acute self-consciousness. Eilis is alert to every detail, from the whiteness of the women’s palms to their elaborate politeness, the desire to pretend everything is normal, the lurking fear. Franz Fanon famously located racial politics in the tension of the muscle — and Toibin handles the stiffness and suppressed significance of the scene masterfully. Toibin’s plainstated style can also produce wrenching emotional effects. He conveys Eilis’s tragedy (that forces her to return to Ireland) with details of how others behave, and Eilis’s thoughts veering between wild grief and detached observation.

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