Reading Journal 2024: Brooklyn/Long Island

Reading Journal 2024
Brooklyn
Author: Colm Tóibín

Fell in love with the movie, got drawn to the book a while ago before it got lost in my ever growing TBR list. This years release of a sequel, Long Island, inspired me to pick it up.

Loved a good deal about this book, especially its strong sense of place. It was interesting reading the thematic push and pull of the film, the element that had captured me most fully, back into the minds of these characters. As is common to these types of stories we get a lot of descriptive taking place inside the mind of the characters, in this case Ellis. In some ways it redirects the on-screen journey, such as the poetic rendering of a life defined by these competing allegiances to place and person tha we find in the film, to something more internal, which taken together form an appeal to the transcendent, most notably aware in the adaptation, as it seeks after something that can help define and determine the nature of the decisions in question in this story.

The book narrows in more specifically on the uncertainty of these decisions and choices in the moment. The book doesn’t take the same license in imagining a grander story as the film does, but such an interpretive move is embedded in the text all the same, capturing the rich character journey of someone caught between space and time amidst those competing allegiances and concerns, with both central figures in Ellis’ life representing Ireland and America, belonging and becoming. In this sense it’s not ultimately about the decisions and choices, but rather finding and locating the transcendent value that runs underneath.

Long Island
Colm Tóibín

I’m still parsing out how I feel about this sequel, which is probably a sign of the books overall strength as a literary work. It feels very different from Brooklyn, and yet it is designed to mirror that story in very specific ways at the same time, just from a different perspective.

Whereas Brooklyn spends time establishing its characters and its sense of place, Long Island hits the ground running. If Brooklyn imagined a grander narrative behind the particular tensions Ellis is navigating, tensions that demand certain decisions and choices to be made, Long Island dials much more firmly in on functional reality of her life as it is. In the first few pages we are plunged into a point of crisis regarding the choices she made in Brooklyn, and informed of a planned trip back to Ireland that, as the text makes clear, she now wants to utilize as a means of reflecting on all her past choices and potential regrets. In a very real sense this sequel is playing the events in Brooklyn backwards, just with years of assumed experiences now in tow. This forces her to wrestle with similar tensions, just with different questions and awareness this time around.

One of the things I’m still dwelling on in my assessment of this sequel is the way it defines the world around Ellis in concrete ways, especially when it comes to the people who occupy it. Whereas part of what made Brooklyn compelling was that all the characters were nuanced and complex, certain characters and realities here are not complex at all. It is easy to know exactly how the book wants us to feel about certain elements of the existing tension, which might actually undercut the tension altogether.

What gives me pause though is that I think what the author was doing was using the familiar construct of the first book as a mirror, but one that is meant to point us to a fresh tension, not the same one. It wants to make concrete statements about certain characters so that we might turn our attention to different ones. Along with this, the book flips Brooklyn around by switching who it is we spend the majority of our time with in terms of the two central love intersts of the first book.

I felt this, even as I also resisted some of that intentional shifting in the stories focus. There are other characters that emerge here in more defined ways, and that makes the focus of the story different. Add to this the fact that it is a different character this time around carrying that tension between life in Ireland and life in America, thus allowing Ellis’ own wrestling to push further into the realm of these other dynamics. Its subtle, and I missed experiencing much of that in the moment thanks to being locked in to the story from Brooklyn, but I do think that affords this a unique quality as a sequel. All the more so when you get to the unresolved ending (trigger warnings for those whom are bothered by that).

Overall I liked this. It is more simple, its an easy and breezy read, its more narrowed, but in that I think it brings some thought provoking aspects to the larger story that make it even more interesting, especially if it keeps moving forward (it feels like it will).