Long Island: Colm Tóibín’s Compelling Sequel to Brooklyn Explores Love, Loyalty, and Identity
- John O’Brien, Jr.
- August 1, 2024
- Edited 3 months ago
Table of Contents
Long Island
By Colm Toibin
Simon & Schuster (Scribner)
ISBN 978-1-4767-8513-0 2024 295 pp.
Long Island, Toibin’s sequel to the highly acclaimed Brooklyn, which was made into a successful movie, opens when a stranger (Irish, as it happens) turns up to see Eilis at her Lindenhurst home on Long Island with an ultimatum: the man’s wife is pregnant by Tony, Eilis’s husband, and when the baby is born, he’ll be handing it over to Eilis or leaving it on her doorstep.
Brooklyn
For those readers who have never read Brooklyn or saw the movie, the charm of the book with its immigrant story of Eilis—innocent and friendless, but clever and determined—who intends to start a new life over the water is told. At first, she is homesick, but after meeting Tony, she finds her feet. They marry and she starts a new life.
All that changes with the death of Eilis’s sister, Rose, to whom she was extremely attached when she lived in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. Returning to Ireland to pay her respects, she is reassimilated, which makes her feel that the time spent in America was a sort of fantasy.
She meets Jim Farrell and begins to question whether she should have married Tony. The fact of Tony’s existence and her marriage were never disclosed to anyone other than Rose.
Ostensibly, in Long Island, she returns to Ireland for her mother’s eightieth birthday but is unsure whether her marriage is worth saving due to the unexpected pregnancy. She made it clear before ever leaving Tony that the baby would not be crossing her threshold, nor would Tony’s mother be raising it next door.
The reader of Brooklyn was left at its conclusion with the question: will she return to her husband Tony or remain in Ireland with Jim Farrell?
Long Island answers that question. Eilis returns to Tony; they have two children, and she becomes assimilated into an Italian family unit that becomes overbearing in time, as they live next door to Tony’s parents and his two brothers and their families.
Upon returning to Ireland, her relationship with Jim Farrell is rekindled, and she becomes torn once again about staying or going. She learns that Jim has become engaged. Upon her return, Jim wants to know about her life in America and, more worryingly, to discover if she feels the same way about him as she did 25 years ago.
Honesty is a challenge. In Brooklyn, the deception was hers. She did not reveal that she was married. In Long Island, it is his; he did not tell her he had been seeing an old friend of hers. It becomes a triangle for Jim, and the reader may well ask, are we headed for a third installment?
It was 15 years between the two books (2009-2024). Toibin is almost 70 years old now, so who knows? My review of Brooklyn appeared in the 2009 Ohio Irish American News. (John Will add link). Long Island, like Brooklyn, is another triumph, and a TOP SHELF read.
Terrence Kenneally is an attorney in Rocky River, Ohio. He received his master’s degree from John Carroll University in Irish Studies and teaches Irish literature and history at Elyria Catholic High School.
