Brooklyn a Novel by Colm Toibin

Here is Brooklyn in its early 1950s finery, decked out with burgeoning populations of newly arrived Jews, Irish, Italians and southerners all crowding into adjoining neighborhoods full of shops, full of houses of worship, full of children, full of new and wondrously diverse life. Colm Toibin describes everydayness better than any Brownie camera snapshot possibly could. He simply stands in one place and tells you the reader everything he sees....everything. He moves to the next place and does the same, and again and again.

In this novel he follows a young girl of nineteen from her mother's house in Ireland onto a boat to Liverpool, through a day in Liverpool after which her elder brother sees her off on the ship to America, on the transatlantic crossing, to a boarding house in Brooklyn. Toibin follows her to work as a department store shop girl, to night school at Brooklyn College, to a church dance where she meets her Tony, to Coney Island, to bed, and on her return home to Ireland, from the family graveyard to the crux of the matter: will she stay or will she go?

Toibin's gift for descriptive writing is on a par with Ian McEwan's: the two simply focus the camera differently, with McEwan intently frontlighting the woman herself (thinking here of Briony in Atonement) as she moves from time to time and place to place, and Toibin backlighting the woman by his intricate and intimate description of her changing surroundings. The result's the same: a beautiful story, a beautiful book.

This is my first read of Toibin and certainly not the last. He has five other novels out, one of which along with Brooklyn was listed for the Man Booker prize. I see by the frontispiece however that he also has a number of nonfiction works out, including one called The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. I'll be looking out a copy of that one.