Colm Tóibín | Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh | May 10, 7 p.m.
The Irish author Colm Tóibín will come to North Carolina for the very first time this month on a tour for his latest novel, Long Island, a sequel to 2009’s beloved blockbuster Brooklyn. The first of the two books—of the many that Tóibín, a literature professor at Columbia University and prolific critic and journalist, has written—follows Eilis Lacey, a young immigrant in the 1950s torn between Ireland and her new (titular) home.
Long Island picks up the thread many years later when Eilis, now a mother of two children, receives the sudden news—within the first few pages—that her husband has gotten another woman pregnant and that her family is expected to take the child in. From there, Eilis returns to Ireland on a visit, where she again finds herself painfully suspended between two worlds, as she reconnects with childhood friend Nancy Sheridan and old flame Jim Farrell, and is confronted with old choices. Tóibín is a great writer of silence and this sequel, like much of his work, is an exercise in restraint, with what is left unsaid on the page mirroring the omissions and half-truths of his characters’ lives.
Ahead of his May 10 visit to Quail Ridge Books, the INDY spoke with Tóibín about the novel, similitude between Southern and Irish culture, and student anti-war protests.
INDY: What made you decide to return to this story?
TÓIBIN: You can’t get enough energy just from revealing what you think might have happened after a novel has ended. So, I got the idea, and it was something I normally wouldn’t think about too much because it was too sudden, that opening—you know, the person arriving at her door—and I thought ‘that’s, another novel, another book.’ But then I started to think about plot, the idea of plot. Plot is where something happens and the consequences of what happens become the plot—not the event but the way in which the event allows for consequences. And this was a total event that allowed for consequences and this was, I thought, an event that allowed for consequences.
With Eilis, she keeps things so internal. She’s very good at concealing but you realize this is something where you realize her silence will not work on. And therefore, I realized, I have a novel, because this will put pressure on her. I don’t keep a diary, but you get loads of different days where another thing occurs to you: ‘Oh, she can go home. This will take her home.’ If she’d just gone home, that wouldn’t have been enough, she had to have something on her mind that was big. And so, slowly, the thing came into being, but it was a long time of holding images and scenes and refining them, and writing nothing, and seeing what would happen if I just left it for a while.
With Eilis, it’s interesting because it’s like she’s stonewalling the situation. There’s so much off the page—there’s not pages of reflection about Tony’s infidelity.
Yes, I felt that if she goes on about the infidelity and dwells on it, that’s things the reader already knows. There won’t be anything unexpected. Whereas what she does is unexpected, not what she thinks.
I was struck in interviews and reviews that this is mostly spoken of as Eilis’s story—which I get, since it’s a sequel to Brooklyn—with Nancy as a secondary character. But to me, partially because she’s so sympathetic, I thought of her as a primary character. Were there moments where she had hierarchy? How did you go about balancing perspectives?
The first part of the book is from Eilis’s perspective. And what I did with that, is that I cut it back to make space for what is coming. And so then every section is now told from three perspectives and so, yes, you’re absolutely right, slowly, Nancy, who was her best friend—[you get] her perspective, but also Jim Farrell, who she [Eilis] had a great romance with. And so slowly you realize that Eilis is the interloper, she’s the outsider. In the novel, you think she’s going home, but she’s not: She’s coming into a situation that has already happened.
So Jim and Nancy start to take over and you realize that Jim doesn’t say much, Nancy does all the talking for both of them. So yeah, you realize slowly—and I had to be very, very careful with Nancy. She’s quick-witted, but not too quick-witted. She’s very nice and Jim really likes her. You know, when they go on that journey to Dublin, whatever way she behaves in the car, which is very natural to her—talking, leaving silence—she makes him feel great. And so you realize: There is something between them.
And it seems like he trusts her, which is important because he can’t trust Eilis anymore. It almost seems like he’s reprising her deception of him in Brooklyn with his deception by omission.
Yes, but I had to be careful to make it not too obvious, like it’s not deliberate.
I was also struck—and I’m trying not to include a spoiler here, but—with the way that silence functions as a device, how it’s told from Nancy’s perspective, and then there’s this gap. We begin to see her putting together the pieces of what might be happening behind her back, and then there’s the gap, and she takes a big action at the end. And within that gap, you understand what went on in her head. I love that.
Yes, exactly. You have Nancy in scene one, and then you have scenes two and three that tell you what Nancy did, without Nancy being present. There’s a constant sense of, you have to be careful not to put in too much, but let the reader know it, as a slant—when Eilis goes to see her mother, it’s: ‘Oh. Nancy’s been here.’
This is a bit of a diversion but have you seen the movie Challengers?
Nope.
It’s about a love triangle.
Ah, okay! I gotta watch this.
I think you should! It’s a tennis movie.
Oh, the tennis movie! I was trying to watch it the other day but couldn’t find it playing. I’m certainly going to watch it.
What role do the titles Brooklyn and Long Island play?
Eilis’s children will experience Long Island—they’ll get to know about school and dating and friends, where you go, where you don’t go, summers on those beaches—and Eilis will never have that. For her, as an outsider, she knows the same of the place but Long Island is inside about three or four rooms, and perhaps her garden and her mother-in-law’s house and Jones Beach. She’s not experiencing it as someone born there. It’s the name of a place she goes to—same with Brooklyn. That’s where she writes home from and says she is, but she’s living in the shadows.
Shadows and silence are big parts of your work. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in the South, but it feels like there’s some cultural kinship between it and Ireland. The way you speak about it, with gossip is a necessary social function, but also there’s so much shame and silence around the things that actually affect people’s lives.
Yes, I think both societies have known various forms of repression. Religion is very important. But what’s mainly important is that there’s a sense of community and inside that community, people have to be very careful. It’s a way of controlling and a way of guarding people.
And also, of course, both [places] have a sense of speech as performance. That if you have a sentence such as ‘Oh, the trees are getting very green at the moment’—in Ireland, there are many ways of saying that, and in the South.
I know from literature and films that there’s a whole way of saying that in which a lot of things might be implied. And that speech as performance is as much a way of concealing something as much as it is a way of adding poetry and flavor and texture to the occasion.
You see that in Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty: Someone’s saying something, but you can see that they don’t mean it, but not just that—it’s something else they’re really trying to say or conceal. And that belongs to speech as performance. We have it, and you have it.
Yeah, there’s always subtext.
Yes, I should have said it that way: There’s always subtexts to something that even sounds so rich, even in just pronouncing a word. People talk about a Southern drawl, and that’s a cliche, but I mean the whole way someone might use a word and you wouldn’t quite know where the irony was.
On the topic of silence, and I don’t know how comfortable you’ll feel answering this, but in 1992 and 2016 you visited Israel and Palestine and wrote about it then. That’s a topic that is pervaded by silence. I’m curious what it’s like for you to observe the past six months or so as the boundaries around that silence have shifted.
I have a very sort of strict policy on this, which is that I only listen to people who live there. The number of people who feel entitled to discuss this matter is really enormous, it’s beyond belief. It’s beyond belief that people who don’t know how to get to Jericho, or, who controls water in Jericho, can give me a lecture on the West Bank. I say ‘Hebron is different to Jericho’ and people look absolutely blank.
So, therefore, that applies to me too [laughs]. The idea that I have a view on this country, where I have been three times and read some books about, is just absurd. I think everyone should stop telling us all about it unless they live there. And if they live there, I really want to hear enough from them. I’m not hearing enough from ordinary Israelis and I’m not hearing enough from people in Gaza and cities in the West Bank, I’m not hearing enough from the Israeli army.
I’m hearing too much from Benjamin Netanyahu, I’m hearing too much from the Hamas leaders. I don’t want to hear from Hamas leaders. Benjamin Netanyahu is different because he’s a democratically elected leader but, nonetheless, I want to hear much more and I want to shut up and be told to shut up and I want other people to go quiet. ‘Will you sign petitions, will you support’—you know nothing about this! I don’t mean you personally. I know nothing about it. Do not listen to me.
Does that apply to your perception of student protests as well?
No, it does not. The student protests at Columbia University I witnessed every day because I was teaching on the campus, I was using the library. The student protest was right in front of the library and it was peaceful, well-organized, graceful, and almost genial. What people saw on television were different protests not by Columbia students but outside the campus, on Amsterdam and Broadway. But they were people who couldn’t get into campus because by then you had to get a card to swipe in—and got filmed and they were out of control. The students inside were not out of control and I know them, some of them were my students. They feel very deeply about this and really have something to say.
The university decided to overreact. We had an extraordinary thing: We had a riot squad with no riot. You look at these images and think, ‘Where is the riot since there’s a riot squad?’ And there’s nothing. It’s certainly not the police’s fault—the university called them in, twice. The university created a paranoia and the students were caught in this extraordinary idea that they were rioting, which they weren’t, and that they were a danger to people, which they weren’t, and that they were creating a climate of fear, which they weren’t.
And in my view, if you don’t have a right to protest on a university campus—well, I suppose the question is, why not? And if that peaceful protest using half a lawn and tents is not acceptable, what sort of protest do they want? Do they want us to stay home and protest, be silent and protest, disappear and protest? I think there are many questions the Columbia authorities have to answer. But, I was there, and I saw it, so I can talk about it. And it was not what anyone thought it was. It was easygoing and peaceful.
There’s been some discussion lately of the role of money in contemporary fiction and how class, money, and jobs are depicted. Those are big themes for your characters, for Eilis and Nancy. Is that a thought you have when writing fiction—how to depict the material reality of their lives? Or does that just come naturally?
It’s really important. The big issue is, you read a novel sometimes and think, this writer knows absolutely nothing about work—because this writer has been writing and writing is not work in the same way that factory work is work or being in a newspaper office is work. You read and think, ‘I wish the writer would find out more about how people make a living.’
Jim’s life is dictated by what he does. You know exactly what sort of bar he runs, what his hours are. With Nancy, we know exactly how she makes money—not much money, but enough to feel better, at what we called at the time a Fish and Chips shop, where they make fried potatoes. It’s very important that Tony is a plumber and also that Eilis has a part-time job as a bookkeeper. Each of them has a job and it’s vital for me that I try and understand that. There’s a moment when Eilis is back in Ireland and someone says to her, ‘Irish hotels are not as grand as American hotels.’ And she doesn’t want to say to them that she’s never stayed in a hotel in her life—she’s not that sort of American.
I’ve written two books about writers, Thomas Mann and Henry James. And they’re writers, that’s what they do. But you realize sometimes that you’re making a character and that it’s a metaphor for writing. And Jim at the bar is that kind of figure—he does things for everyone, he’s watching, he doesn’t drink, doesn’t participate. It may be that I’m using that, but my aim is that he’s in a real bar and has real problems. He can’t go to a dance on a Saturday night because he has to work.
As someone who has worked at a bar, it feels like Jim knows what he’s doing.
[Laughs]. I’ve worked at a bar, too.
Last question, for readers who come to the end of the book, which is left open-ended—do you have active plans to write a sequel?
The distance between finishing Brooklyn and starting this was something like 13 years. I’m going to be 69 this month, so that would make me 82.
Happy birthday.
Thank you.
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