Reviewed by Ruth Latta
Long Island
by Colm Tóibín
Picador
May 2024, Hardcover, 304 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1035029440
“You can’t repeat the past,” says Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel, The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby replies, “Why of course you can.”
As many readers know, the tragedy of Fitzgerald’s novel is that Gatsby can’t win Daisy Buchanan away from her husband. His success in American does not bring him what he wants most, and he ends up dead in the swimming pool of his mansion on Long Island.
In Long Island, Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Eilis Lacey Fiorello, protagonist of his earlier novel, Brooklyn, is supposedly living the American dream with her husband and children in an family cul-de-sac on Long Island. An immigrant to America from Enniscorthy, Eire, she has paid one visit home, shortly after her arrival in the United States in 1951. Twenty-one years later, she suddenly decides to return to Ireland to celebrate her mother’s eightieth birthday.
Readers familiar with Brooklyn know that Eilis Lacey left Ireland because of dim employment prospects at home. Her elder sister arranged her departure through a New York priest from Enniscorthy, who helped with the details of immigration and found her a job in Brooklyn. Eilis survived seasickness and homesickness to become a successful department store clerk and business college student.
At a dance, she met Tony Fiorello, a young plumber, who fell in love with her at first sight. She started going out with him, but while their relationship was deepening, her sister in Ireland died suddenly. When Eilis arranged time off to go home, Tony was afraid she won’t return, and persuaded her to marry him in a city hall wedding.
Back in Enniscorthy, she was greeted as a sophisticated American, no longer plain little Eilis Lacey. There she met a hotel owner’s son, Jim Farrell, who’d hardly looked at her before, and the two began double-dating with her friend Nancy and Nancy’s fiancé, George. Eilis’s old dreams of love and a decent job in Enniscorthy seemed to be coming true when she began filling in at her late sister’s office, and became close to Jim. The only problem was her secret marriage, and Tony seemed far away and hardly real. Then, through a trans-Atlantic grapevine, a malicious old women found out that Eilis had a husband in America, and confronted her with the news. Brooklyn ended with Eilis confessing to her mother, leaving Jim a note of explanation and departing quietly, wondering if he would forget her.
In 1972, when Long Island takes place, Eilis is a wife, mother and bookkeeper in Lindenhurst, Long Island. She and Tony have two teenagers, Rosella and Larry. Tony is in the plumbing business with his two brothers, who all live with their wives and children near the Fiorello parents. On Sundays, the senior Fiorellos host a family lunch and everyone is expected to show up.
Long Island opens when Eilis’s mother-in-law, Francesca, drops in to tell her about an Irishman who came around looking for her when she was at work. A few days later, a stranger turns up and informs her that Tony has fathered a child with his wife: “His plumbing is so good that she is to have a baby in August…and if anyone thinks I am keeping an Italian plumber’s brat…they can have another think.” He threatens to dump the baby on Eilis and Tony’s doorstep or leave it with one of the other women in the family. After his departure, a stunned Eilis wishes she could phone someone but has no friend in whom to confide this betrayal.
In Part 1 of the novel, we learn more about Eilis’s life since Brooklyn. The American dream has come true for the Fiorello family, but less so for her because she was swallowed up in Tony’s family before she had time to pursue her own goals in a new country. The four Fiorello families live a stone’s throw away from each other, and are constantly in and out of each other’s houses. Tony’s parents still set the rules for all of them.
On one occasion, when Eilis disagrees with her father-in-law about the Vietnam War, her brother-in-law Enzo says “Whoa! Keep quiet, you,” and to Tony, “Can you not control her?” Shortly after that, her mother-in-law drops in and suggests that Eilis might be happier if she didn’t have to suffer through any more long family lunches. After making sure that the family knows that the suggestion came from Francesca, not her, Eilis enjoys leisurely Sundays on her own. No one questions the matter except Eilis’s daughter, Rosella, who thinks her grandfather was unfair to banish her mother for saying she doesn’t want Larry to be killed in Vietnam.
Eilis was bookkeeper for the family business, but when she tried to get Tony and his brothers to adopt a system of invoicing and accounting, Enzo complained to his mother that Eilis was telling them how to run their business. Eilis quit and took a bookkeeping job in a garage owned by a kindly friend of the family.
To help Tony and his family fulfil their American dream, Eilis has had to give up her budding love for Jim Farrell, her Irish-American circle in Brooklyn, her privacy and her dream of a business career. Given the absence of a women’s movement in the 1950s, and its embryonic state in 1972, it is probably unrealistic to imagine her carving out a free, independent life for herself.
Though shattered by the news of Tony’s betrayal, Eilis does not fall apart outwardly, but stays rock- solid and silent while trying to think things through. Tony’s patriarchal family expect her to raise the child, and try to play on her emotions to persuade her, but she firmly tells them that she will not have the baby in her house. Not only would it constantly remind her of Tony’s infidelity, but also she would have to quit work and go back to diapers and night feedings.
Eilis’s best friend in the Fiorello family is her brother-in-law, Frank, the precocious child in Brooklyn who wrote the letters that Tony sent to Eilis on her trip to Ireland. Now a lawyer in Manhattan, Frank has generously offered to pay Rosella’s way through university because Eilis and Tony can’t afford it. Mother Francesca keeps pressuring Frank to find a girlfriend, but he has confided to Eilis that he’s gay. When Eilis explains to Tony that Frank is “one of those men,” Tony is shocked and makes her promise never to say that again, to him or anyone else.
When Eilis consults Frank about what Tony has done, she finds that he knows the situation already; the cuckolded husband has already come to his office. She learns as well that her parents-in-law know the truth, and will take the child if Eilis refuses. Implying that Tony will adopt the baby, Frank tells Eilis, “You need to work this out between the two of you.” Eilis repeats that she doesn’t want the baby anywhere near her, and leaves, disappointed that he is toeing the family line.
When Francesca tells Eilis that, “The baby will be a member of the family whether we like it or not,” Eilis replies firmly that the family has no business making plans behind her back. She will not have her children’s peace and happiness disturbed by Tony’s misdeed, nor tolerate the child being brought up under her nose.
She then arranges time off from her job to go to Ireland for the summer. When Tony asks if she will promise to come back, she asks him to vow not to let it be raised by anyone in the family. He makes no reply. When she tells the children about his indiscretion they ask to join her in Ireland in August. Hearing these plans, Tony asks if he has any say in this, and Eilis says, “None.”
Part Two of the novel begins with another woman having a hard time. Eilis’s girlhood friend Nancy, George’s widow, is running a chip shop in Enniscorthy. The Sheridans’s family grocery business couldn’t compete with the new supermarket, and failed. Her son, in his late teens, is supposed to be her partner, but he refuses to work Saturday nights – his party nights but her busiest time. She has two daughters, one shortly to get married, the other a law student in Dublin who wants Nancy to smarten herself up.
Jim Farrell, who has for many years owed his parents’ hotel across the market square from Nancy’s business, came to her rescue one Saturday night when she was dealing with obstreperous drunken customers. This friendly act led to time spent in each other’s company and eventually a sexual relationship. Clearly, Nancy needs a husband’s moral and economic support, and when Jim proposes that they “become more serious” – get engaged – she starts drawing up plans for a house in the countryside near Enniscorthy. Yet to be worked out is the future of her business and whether she will work in Jim’s hotel. With her daughter’s wedding coming up, she and Jim decide not to tell anyone of their plans to get engaged. They never get around to discussing what their future will look like.
When Eilis arrives in Enniscorthy and calls on Nancy, the latter feels no great resurgence of girlhood friendship, yet invites Eilis to her daughter’s wedding. When Eilis asks about Jim, Nancy doesn’t mention their understanding, but says he has a girlfriend out of town.
Meanwhile, Eilis’s mother is being nasty to her. Using money given to her by Frank, who feels sorry for her, Eilis buys her mother some appliances, but her mother refuses to have them installed. As the novel progresses, Mrs. Lacey is shown to be as duplicitous, manipulative and controlling as Francesca Fiorello. They are two sides of the same coin, except that Mrs. Lacey doesn’t pretend to be friendly, but openly disparages Eilis and picks fights with her. She shows no interest in Eilis’s children or her life in America, but talks at length about Eilis’s married brothers in England. Another brother, Martin, has moved back to Ireland, lives with his mother, and also has a beach cottage near Cush. Eilis’s wealthiest brother, Jack, has purchased her mother’s house, with the understanding that she’ll live in it for the rest of her life. Then it will the Martin’s, and eventually go to Jack’s children.
Later, when Jack hears of Eilis’s troubles, he offers to buy her a house in America, and, though she’s embarrassed, she files away the offer in her mind. Needing a breather from her mother, she goes alone to stay at Martin’s cottage for a few days and try to sort out her thoughts. At this point, she isn’t sure she wants to disrupt her children’s lives by breaking up with Tony. Then, walking on the beach, she meets Jim Farrell.
While Jim likes Nancy and enjoys what she has to offer, he has never forgotten Eilis. Over the years, he hasn’t had much female companionship and isn’t about to turn it down, but he wonders if he and Nancy should just stay engaged and continue as friends with benefits rather than getting married. He is convinced that Eilis didn’t set out to make a fool of him years ago in not divulging that she was married. On hearing that she’s back, he can’t sleep, and when Nancy goes to Dublin to buy a dress for her daughter’s wedding, he drives down to Cush to speak to Eilis.
They exchange news about their lives, but not about Jim’s engagement to Nancy, and not about Tony’s baby. When Jim asks Eilis if she has ever thought about him, she doesn’t reply. He reflects: “When he had known her she was softer. She would have made it easier for him.”
Soon after that, however, she and Jim become intimate, though rendez-vous become more difficult when her children arrive. Her mother dotes on Rosella and Larry and they enjoy being in Ireland. Then Eilis intercepts a letter addressed to Rosella from her Grandmother Fiorello. Handwritten by Frank, it announces the birth of Rosella’s sister, Helen Frances: “Your father is besotted with her and your grandfather has not stopped smiling since little Helen came into the house…” Also included is a photo of the baby, with Tony’s hand supporting this baby the way he’d once held Rosella and Larry. The picture brings Eilis to a decision.
At the Cush cottage, Eilis tells Jim that she doesn’t want to stay married to Tony. She wants to be with Jim, but there are complications. She must go back to Long Island, get Rosella settled at Fordham University and Larry in high school, get back to work and make things “as normal as possible.” She will accept Jack’s offer of financial help with a house, which will be on Long Island, but not next door to Tony’s family. Jim is willing to come to New York, but she explains that she can’t live with him right away as it would affect her divorce settlement. If Jim comes to American he’ll have to spend the winter on his own in a strange country, having limited contact with her. This time next year, however, they could be living together in her new house on Long Island.
It seems like a plan, but eventually Nancy finds out about Eilis and Jim. Desperate for financial security and status as a married woman, she puts on the engagement ring that her late husband, George, gave her years earlier, and starts spreading the news that she and Jim are soon to be married in Rome. When Eilis hears this news, she realizes that the tables have been turned on her. Years ago she kept her marriage to Tony a secret. Now, Jim has kept his relationship with Nancy a secret.
When Eilis goes to Jim’s living quarters in the hotel to find out the truth, she is very calm as she questions him.
“If the phone rang in your garage in Long Island one morning, and it was me,” says Jim, “and I was in New York or even closer, and I had come to see you, what would you say?”
Eilis doesn’t answer, but just leaves as if in a daze, trying to get her head around the situation. The ball is in Jim’s court, and Colm Tóibín leaves us with an open ending.
Tóibín excels at novels from a woman’s point of view. Here he gives a sympathetic portrait of two women shaken by events and hoping for a second chance. The main male characters, Tony and Jim, lack the determination and character of Eilis and Nancy. Unthinking, they grab onto the first thing that comes along. The women are thinkers and planners, even when their lives are crumbling.
In Brooklyn, when Tony searched for the word for Eilis’s easy-going nature, she supplied “amenable.” The word means “open and responsive to suggestion; easily persuaded or controlled.”
Eilis is amenable no more. Her resolution and toughness show that she will survive, with Jim Farrell or without him. Sometimes you can repeat the past, and it may point you to a better future.
About the reviewer: Ruth Latta’s novel, A Striking Woman, (Ottawa, Baico, 2023, info@baico.ca), is a story of true love and trade union organizing.