There is much duplicity in this captivating novel! It seems as if every main - and most of the minor - characters are deceiving someone close to them. This is not consciously manipulative behavior; these are generally well meaning people.
Colm Toibin's brand new novel - Long Island - is a sequel to his 2009 novel Brooklyn, which was subsequently made into a movie. In this story that takes place in the 1970s, two fishbowl worlds and two cultures are depicted - one in an Irish village, the other a subdivision on Long Island, NY.
Eilis Lacey Fiorello, who in the original novel emigrated to New York City in the 1950s and married into a close, extended Italian family inhabits both of these entrapping worlds. It is her experience around which the larger story develops. A quiet and mostly responsible woman, she has a way of unleashing disruption within her two families, with little insight on the attendant emotional pain she tends to generate.
Tóibín's depiction of the lives in this story brings to mind novels of Edith Wharton in his focus on the dynamic nuances of private, unspoken thoughts that flit between and among people. Characters always seem to be second guessing each other and themselves. There is context to outline the story, while the pace of the novel often slows down. The reader may spend several pages examining the thoughts and suppositions of a character while only a couple of days - or even just a few hours - have passed, and it's riveting. That is one of the gifts of this writer.
All the drama happens at the beginning and the end of the story, leaving an ending I found satisfying even for its ostensible inconclusiveness. You come to see that all the interpersonal manipulation and deceit of this story is, collectively, people's responses to living in a world where everyone knows too much about each other and there is sometimes too little room to breathe or be true to the self. For these deeper themes I found it compelling reading.
Reviewed by Marianne W
