Current Authors

Colm Tóibín

Personal temperament does not necessarily translate into style. Colm Tóibín has an intense and jocular personality far removed from the reticence and melancholy of his prose. He’s funny. His voice takes up a room. He gladly takes part in the ancient European pastime of lovingly attributing at least some of his conversation partner’s faults to his American background. (“What an American thing to say!” etc…)

Journalists tend to fetishize such differences between the man and the book. In Tóibín’s case, the difference is so startling, the temptation is irresistible. Tóibín has a Bergman-esque eye for the Irish landscape and a Jamesian eye for the strange, ambiguous and uncomfortable social interaction. In 20 years, he’s published seven works of fiction. The Heather Blazing (1992) drew a portrait of a conservative Irish jurist who appears to coldly study his family at the same distance he studies the law. When The Master (2004) came out, reviewers were fascinated by an unconsummated love scene Tóibín imagined between Henry James and Oliver Wendell Holmes. But the book was really about a figure whose self-imposed exile from his homeland was an extension of his self-denial. In his new book Brooklyn, he tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the early ’50s. She knows a world of love in the economically depressed Ireland she leaves and finds a world of kindness in the prosperous America to which she travels. She resists both.