Long Island 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 287 pp., £20, May, 978 1 0350 2944 0
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Novelists​ don’t usually care for screen adaptations of their work. But the film versions of Atonement, The Remains of the Day and The English Patient do no great disservice to the books. And Colm Tóibín wasn’t unhappy with Nick Hornby’s screenplay for Brooklyn, despite two big changes to the ending. In the novel, when the insidious Enniscorthy shopkeeper Miss Kelly intimates to Eilis that she knows about her secret marriage in the US, Eilis shakes with panic; in the film, taking charge, she proudly tells Miss Kelly her married name (‘Mrs Tony Fiorello’). And whereas the novel ends with her on the train to Wexford, heading for the boat but still thinking about the man she’s been involved with, Jim Farrell, the film concludes with her in Brooklyn in the arms of her husband: ‘This is where your life is,’ she says in a voiceover. Perhaps that ending persuaded Tóibín that the sequel should begin in the US, with Ireland and Jim Farrell safely behind her.

Is Eilis right to have abandoned them? On the face of it, when Long Island opens twenty-odd years later, she’s doing well for herself. She has moved from Brooklyn to Lindenhurst in Long Island, with Tony (a plumber) and their teenage children, Larry and Rosella. Having acted as a bookkeeper for Tony’s family, she’s now working for a local Armenian garage owner as well. Tony’s parents live in the same cul-de-sac, as do his brothers Enzo and Mauro and their families. Everyone knows each other’s business, so much so that when a stranger (Irish, as it happens) turns up to see Eilis with an ultimatum, other members of the family already know what’s going on. The man’s wife is pregnant by Tony, he announces, and when the baby is born he’ll be handing it over to Eilis or leaving it on her doorstep.

Tóibín’s early novels aren’t notable for high drama. They may explore death and grief but it’s the texture of ordinary life that sustains them: card games, house renovations, gossip, waiting for the postman, walking in the drizzle, shopping and drinking. There’s no lack of quotidian substance in Long Island, from men discussing ball games to the use of Windolene to ease a ring onto a finger. But because of the threat posed by ‘the man’ (unnamed until later) the novel begins as explosively as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard puts his wife up for sale. Eilis understands where the man is coming from, as if his belligerence were a tribal norm: ‘She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.’ Her response, as a betrayed wife, is muted and slow-burning; she and Tony continue to share a bed, if not to have sex (a recent resurgence in their sex life, she realises, came at the time he was getting another woman pregnant). There’s just one issue on which she’s adamant: the baby won’t be crossing her threshold, nor will Tony’s mother, Francesca, be raising it next door.

The charm of Brooklyn (2009) was its immigrant story, as Eilis, innocent and friendless but clever and determined, starts a new life over the water. At first she’s homesick (‘She was nobody here’; ‘She belonged somewhere else’). But after meeting Tony she finds her feet. The liberation she feels when she passes her college exams (‘how beautiful everything was ... She had never felt like this before ... [it] had given her a new freedom’) is reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood in a California diary entry in 1940: ‘I love this country. I love it just because I don’t belong ... I feel free here. I’m on my own. My life will be what I make of it.’ All that changes with the death of Eilis’s sister, Rose. Returning to Ireland to pay her respects, she’s reassimilated, which ‘made every day she had spent in America a sort of fantasy, something she could not match with the time she was spending at home. It made her feel strangely as though she were two people.’

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Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024

‘Novelists don’t usually care for screen adaptations of their work,’ Blake Morrison claims (LRB, 6 June). They should be so lucky. Films often improve the books on which they’re based. Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho is not generally taken to be better than Hitchcock’s film. Most people don’t know Pierre Boileau’s D’entre les morts, but they do know Vertigo. Orson Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons, even with its butchered ending, is far more memorable than Booth Tarkington’s original. Robert Harris adapted his own novel for Roman Polanski’s masterpiece about the Dreyfus case, An Officer and a Spy. Does anyone think Dreiser’s American Tragedy is a patch on George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun? As for The Zone of Interest … I rest my case.

David Hare
London NW3

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