Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín.
Let's examine the options open to young Irish womenfolk in the early 1950s: grow up, meet a nice man in the village, squeeze out a platoon of kids (Catholics, don't forget), raise and care for them largely single-handed while your husband is either off tilling the soil or knocking back the Guinness down the pub, live to an exhausted and embittered old age, die. Or possibly, not meet a nice young man, live to a ripe and embittered spinsterish old age. If you don't fancy either of those, then your remaining options can be enumerated as follows: nun.
To be honest, Eilis Lacey isn't the especially ambitious type and is reasonably sanguine about the whole nice young man/kids route through life. But when her older sister Rose - more outgoing, more socially confident and on the face of it more likely to be the one to flee in search of a brighter future life - makes use of some of her contacts to wangle Eilis a job and some accommodation in Brooklyn, Eilis doesn't feel able to refuse.
She starts to wish she had, though, on the trip across - a rough crossing from Liverpool which Eilis mostly spends confined to the cramped third-class cabin vomiting copiously and competing for access to the shared bathroom with the people in the next cabin along. But eventually that particular ordeal is over, and the
land of opportunity is reached.
Eilis moves into the house run by Mrs. Kehoe, a mostly kindly but spiky old bird who takes a dim view of nonsense, which encompasses everything from intemperate unladylike levity at mealtimes and failure to behave with the proper decorum to the more serious stuff involving relations with Men, particularly Unsuitable Men, i.e. those who might try to tempt the girls into inappropriate behaviour like smoking, drinking and noisily penetrative sexual intercourse. Precious little time for Eilis to get involved with any of that in the short term anyway as she's busy making herself indispensable at her job in Bartocci's department store during the days and attending to her own personal betterment at bookkeeping and accountancy classes in the evenings.
But you've got to let your hair down sometimes, and eventually Eilis agrees to go to a local dance with some of the other girls from Mrs. Kehoe's, and meets a nice
young man called Tony. Tony seems nice, and a series of chaste and respectful dates ensues, although Tony does get a little bit frisky in the sea at Coney Island, as men tend to do. Eilis is invited to meet his family, a typically demonstratively hand-wavey and meatball-obsessed bunch of Italian-Americans, and all seems to be proceeding in the time-honoured manner until Eilis receives a bombshell from home: Rose has died unexpectedly of a hitherto-unsuspected heart defect. Eilis dithers a bit but then decides that she needs to go home to see her mother. Tony is sympathetic to Eilis' plight, but not so trusting of her promises to return that he doesn't seek to secure their relationship status by a) sleeping with her and b) arranging a quickie registry-office marriage before her ship sails.
Her mother, while obviously genuinely devastated at the loss of her elder daughter and primary companion, isn't above a bit of emotional blackmail to get Eilis to prolong her stay in Ireland. Obviously Eilis has to keep herself amused while she's looking after Mum, and she does so by re-inserting herself into her old life, including going on what amount to a couple of double-dates with her friend Nancy, Nancy's fiancé George, and George's friend Jim Farrell. Jim seems like a nice lad and is obviously quite keen on Eilis, which presents Eilis with something of a dilemma: stay in Ireland with Jim or return to Brooklyn and Tony. Obviously option A carries a few problems, not least the fact that she and Tony are already married to each other. Eilis is not the ruthlessly decisive type, so basically she drifts around putting off making a decision until her two worlds start to bleed into one another and the decision is effectively made for her.
Here is the opposite end of the novelistic spectrum from the absurdly showy, ostentatiously complex stuff like
House Of Leaves. This, by contrast, is deceptively simple, written exclusively from Eilis' fairly naïve and innocent
perspective, and with the slightly darker stuff buried where you have to look quite carefully for it: Rose's motivations for sending Eilis off across the Atlantic, Bartocci's pioneering choice to allow black customers into their store, Eilis' more senior colleague Miss Fortini's slightly too intimate interest in helping Eilis try on bathing suits for her trip to Coney Island with Tony, Tony's own seizing on Eilis' vulnerability in the wake of Rose's death to get his end away.
Some or all of the above could have been avoided if Eilis had been a less infuriatingly passive character with barely any agency of her own. That, combined with the stultifyingly oppressive social mores of 1950s Ireland (and 1950s Irish-Americans in New York), makes this in some ways a slightly frustrating read, but of course that's a reflection of the prevailing reality of the period in which the book is set, rather than a criticism of the book itself or its author. I didn't, for what it's worth, think it was quite as good as Tóibín's
The Blackwater Lightship (a book with a more contemporary setting). The other Tóibín on this list is
The Heather Blazing.
