Home to mother: Long Island, by Colm Toibín, reviewed

Colm Toibin’s new novel starts with a bang – or rather, the results of one. It is only on the second page that an Irishman arrives at Eilis Fiorello’s house and threatens to leave his wife’s love child on her doorstep, it being also the doorstep of the father, Tony. ‘If anyone thinks I am keeping an Italian plumber’s brat in my house and have my own children believe that it came into the world as decently as they did, they can have another think.’

As a sequel to Brooklyn, it makes sense that Long Island is quick out of the blocks. Which is exactly what Eilis and Tony are out of, having moved with the entire Fiorello family to the sweeping developmentia of Lindenhurst. There is no privacy. Patriarchy governs. Eilis is the only one to challenge her father-in-law on Vietnam and the patriotism it obliges. ‘Can you not control her?’ one of Tony’s brothers asks, to no response. Tony, for his part, ‘should have supported her at the table, or moved the conversation to some other topic.’ He should indeed, and we should have reached that conclusion without Toibin’s help, which stumbles halfway between narrative comment and interior monologue. ‘But he could not go against his father.’

That said, it would be hard to accuse Toibin of overwriting. The confrontations between Eilis and Tony happen offstage, or are so tight-lipped that we don’t notice them as confrontations. Eilis is as set against keeping the baby as the man who is going to turf it out; but when she learns that Tony and his family think differently she removes to Ireland for the first time in 20 years.