In Colm Tóibín’s novel Long Island, the excellent sequel to Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey faces knotty decisions. Her husband of twenty years impregnated another woman and Eilis wants nothing to do with the baby, but the other woman’s husband says he will leave the baby on Eilis’s doorstep. Eilis’s mother-in-law, who lives next door, plans to welcome and raise the baby, but won’t come out and say so. Eilis gets away to Ireland for a long visit with her mother and reconnects with an old flame and considers leaving her husband. But what about her teenage children? And what would her family and friends think?
What is so gripping about Long Island is how Tóibín shows how one knot threads into other knots. The old flame with whom Eilis reconnects is Jim Farrell, whom Eilis first took up with twenty years ago during a visit to Ireland after she had secretly married her husband in America. And when Jim falls again for Eilis, he is secretly engaged to Eilis’s old friend Nancy Sheridan, who fears that by marrying Jim she is betraying her dead husband, George:
“As the taxi made its way past Donnybrook, [Nancy] saw that, no matter what, she would be disloyal to one of them. In feeling so tenderly towards George, in dreaming how happy she would be with him at the wedding [of their daughter], she was imagining a life without Jim. But if, instead, she thought only of Jim, how lucky she was to be with him, it felt as if she were leaving George behind.”
And these knots thread into still more knots.
Listed in a short review by a writer lacking Tóibín’s gifts, these problems might sound like an unrealistically big and messy tangle of moral dilemmas. But introduced and examined across a 300-page novel by a brilliant storyteller, the dilemmas characters face appear all too believable and characters’ ways of (mis)handling their problems appear all too human.
Reading Long Island, I thought of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s book Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Nussbaum observes how art, and especially literature, is often a better venue for moral reflection than standard analytic philosophy. While philosophy can help us clarify general concepts, literature can help us see and attend to the all-important details, the unfolding details, of people’s efforts to ask and to keep asking the key moral question, How should I live? Nussbaum writes:
“[I]t is only by following a pattern of human choice and commitment over a relatively long time—as the novel characteristically does—that we can understand the pervasiveness of such conflicts in human efforts to live well.”
Few characters in Long Island live particularly well. But watching them try to untangle themselves from—and often further entangle themselves in—life’s dilemmas, we can reflect on some of our deepest hopes and fears about love, regret, and obligation.
So, I could end this review by calling Tóibín a keen moral philosopher, but I’ll end it instead with the better compliment of calling him a great novelist who has written another wonderful book.
FICTION
by Colm Tóibín
Scribner
Published on May 7, 2024
