Long Island by Colm Tóibín – 15/20 Books of Summer

In Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey was encouraged by her sister Rose to leave her small town in Ireland for better employment prospects in New York. She finds a job in a department store and takes bookkeeping classes at night but is lonely. Eventually, she began attending Friday night dances with a friend and meets an Italian-American plumber. When she gets bad news from home that Rose has died, Tony persuades her to get married secretly before she returns to Ireland to be with her mother.

Back in Ireland she settles back into her life there and spends time with her friend Nancy, Nancy’s fiancé, and their friend, Jim Farrell. Everyone assumes she will marry Jim but Eilis knows she is not free and eventually returns to New York.

This sequel, Long Island, begins twenty years later, late 1970s, and we see how Eilis’ life has turned out. She lives in the suburbs with Tony and her two children, close to her less-than-compatible in-laws, and does bookkeeping for an Armenian car-dealer. A man comes to her front door to say that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the child is born, he is going to leave it on their doorstep. Stunned, Eilis has to face that her husband has been unfaithful and he and his family expect her to give this baby a home. Instead, she decides to go to Ireland for her mother’s 80th birthday, and have the children follow her several weeks later. The rest of the story takes place in Enniscorthy as Eilis, feeling achingly alone, slips back into her old community and tries to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

My Impression: I read the first book about Eilis with my book group nearly 15 years ago (I think we saw the movie too) and I really enjoyed the description of her life and work in 1950s New York as well as Tóibín’s understated style. Eilis is a well-drawn character, coping very quietly with her adaptation to a new country and new job. It wasn’t her idea to move to New York; it was orchestrated by her sister and their priest, but once she is there, she is resourceful and makes the best of her opportunities. By the time, we meet up with her again, she has a completely different life, living in the Long Island suburbs. She coexists with her exuberant in-laws by never telling them how she feels or what she thinks of them. The one she gets along with best is the brother-in-law who is a lawyer, a thoughtful and educated man, unlike his siblings, who offers to pay for her daughter Rosella to attend Fordham. However, even he cannot officially take her side when she refuses to take Tony’s illegitimate child into her home. I liked him as an ally for Eilis and appreciated that he gave her money to help fund her trip to Ireland but then he lost points by telling his annoying family he had done so.

Eilis is the only person who seems to think her marriage is in crisis, which is understandable in an era where divorce was uncommon. She is less passive than in the first book but isn’t sure what she wants, other than she is sure she does not want to accept this other woman’s child.

She wished she could speak clearly to Tony as he drove, let him know once and for all what the consequences would be if he and his mother did not see sense.

But if she spoke, she would lose him. He had already decided what to do about the baby. Once more, she saw that if she made the threats, she would mean them. And it was that knowledge that kept her from speaking. She was not sure she wanted to lose him, not certain either that she wished to bring Rosella and Larry from adolescence to adulthood without everything they had been used to, including their father. Her uncertainly almost made her nauseous as they began the last stretch to the airport.

Eilis is shocked by how everything in her childhood home is exactly as it was 20 years ago when she left. Her mother still doesn’t own a refrigerator or washing machine so Eilis buys them for her as a surprise, pleased to be doing something that will make her mother’s life easier. But Mrs. Lacey refuses to have them installed so the new appliance boxes sit there for weeks, getting in everyone’s way.

Between the mother-in-law who is determined to bring Tony’s illegitimate child into their family and her own stubborn mother who never asks questions about her daughter’s life in New York and grumbles the refrigerator and washing machine would use too much electricity, Eilis has her hands full and reconnecting with her old beau, Jim, does not make it easier to decide how to move forward with her life. The book has a leisurely feel until about two-thirds of the way through when it suddenly accelerates – at that point, I could not stop reading so finished it about 1 am. While it is not necessary to have read the first book, I think it would help the reader better appreciate both the New York and Ireland settings. I liked this much better than Nora Webster, which my book group and I found very bleak (intentionally so, but not very much fun to read).  I wonder if Tóibín is planning a third book about Eilis - I hope so!

This is book 15 of my 20 Books of Summer, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. There are three I haven’t started, one I began that is very slow, and one I started that seems promising.

This is book 21 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024.

Publication: Scribner, hardcover, 2024
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: Long Island and Ireland
Source: Copy supplied by the publisher

Off the Blog: A lovely day on Cape Cod with my mother, sister Clare, and two nieces; some time on the beach in Osterville and dinner in Falmouth.