But no worries, these aren't pursued into anything that would risk causing conflict. We are teased with tantalizing potential plot threads: a brilliant professor who might be a Holocaust survivor and is impressed by her curiosity about her bookkeeping law classes, her unpleasant landlord and her unpleasant old boss communicating and exposing her brief 'double life,' an Italian boyfriend who looks suspiciously unlike the rest of his family. At some point she has to choose between her life in New York and a roughly equivalent life back in Ireland, but she studiously avoids finding out anything that could force her to form an opinion. Other than a tragic death in the family and a little homesickness, nothing bad ever happens to Eilis and there isn't any real conflict. She doesn't really make any decisions on her own until the end of the novel, and even that was basically for lack of realistic alternative options. Set partially in 1950-ish Ireland and partly in Brooklyn, the novel follows spineless and benign Eilis through her voyage to the United States (arranged by her sister and a kind priest), where she receives a job, is enrolled some classes, is encouraged to do volunteer work, is set up with lodging at a boarding house, gets picked up and courted by a faultless Italian American, etc. Brooklyn, though, is no The Jungle or Call It Sleep. It's hard to read anything about books without hearing gushing praise for Brooklyn, so I settled in for a brilliant work about immigration and America and New York and alienation and crushing hard work and etc. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm.

When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America-to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood 'just like Ireland'-she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.Įilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy.

Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.Įilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two.

Brooklyn a novel by colm toibin