“Long Island”
Colm Toibin
Scribner, $18.99
It was hard to get beyond the cover of Colm Toibin’s new novel, “Long Island,” where the reader is informed on the front of the dust jacket of two of his previous novels, “The Magician” and “Brooklyn,” while on the inside back fold of the dust jacket we are given to know that Mr. Toibin has in total 11 novels. But upon opening the book — and yes, one does open the book — I found a listing of 12 books under the heading “Fiction.”
Farther along in the listing of books is a subtitle “Nonfiction,” which has 10 titles, and then there are three titles under “Plays” and under “Poetry” one title.
The reader of this review will be spared a journey through such a vast number of titles, though those two on the front cover along with this book’s title would seem to demand something of a reviewer, but I hesitated, as there is only so much time/space and with that ominous listing of 12 books of fiction there is the uncomfortable knowing that “Long Island” is Mr. Toibin’s 13th book of fiction.
How does a reviewer confront such a number: a 13th book of fiction?
A rhetorical question to be sure, but one that probably would be better left to scholars at Harvard University or Suffolk County Community College who are trained and armed to answer such questions, but you as a reader are sure to be caught up in this fiction with unfortunate identifications with what the nets haul up from Great South Bay off Long Island.
So, my rhetorical question must go unanswered, as my task has been to write a notice of “Long Island,” though partially an imbedded sequence within the novel by Mr. Toibin would echo my own movement — at age 2 1/2 from Brooklyn to Long Island, which happened a long time ago from Willoughby Avenue to Furman Lane in Patchogue, while the central character of Mr. Toibin’s novel, Eilis, has actually come directly from Ireland, and it is the novel’s task to send Eilis back to Ireland.
Of course, one must be scrupulously fair to such a distinguished writer, and on the back of the dust jacket we are urged to do so by praise for “Brooklyn” from reviews in USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New Yorker.
I could not do a better job of summing up the novel than the dust jacket’s version: “Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, one of four Italian American brothers. . . . One day, out of the blue” — reviewer’s question: from the sky? — “a man comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child, and that when the baby is born, he will deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep.”
If you are prepared to read more about this situation you are prepared to read the novel. The dust jacket is careful to tell us the essentials about the Irish woman who I guess is the center of the novel: “The silences in Eilis’s life are thunderous and dangerous,” while she has already appeared in “Brooklyn,” the previous novel by Mr. Toibin.
We all know that silence is what got King Lear into a lot of trouble, and sure enough that is what is awaiting the reader . . . and I cannot reveal the truth of the proposed baby dumping, but I fear there will be a further novel when poor Eilis will be sent back to Ireland, though possibly Mr. Toibin will sentence her to a quiet grave somewhere or other with no one to tend that grave.
Thomas McGonigle is the author of “Going to Patchogue,” recently reissued by Tough Poets Press, which will reissue his “Diptych Before Dying” this year.
Colm Toibin is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman professor of the humanities at Columbia University. “Long Island” comes out in paperback on Feb. 25.