Long Island

 Long Island

By Colm Toibin

The second novel following the life of Irish immigrant Eilish finds her facing a crisis. Her husband, Tony, a
plumber, has had an affair with one of his clients' wives, and she is pregnant. Soon, the husband comes to Eilish, and, in grand and angry fashion, declares that he will be depositing the baby on her doorstep, so she better get ready to raise it.

She isn't. She draws a line in the sand with her husband, but it isn't Tony that she has to deal with. The life they have carved out for themselves on Long Island includes a small compound with homes for Tony's parents and siblings all on the same plot of land. At the beginning of the novel, Eilish had made a sort of peace with this somewhat stifling environment. But her mother-in-laws' control over the family, including the fate of the unborn child, is too much for Eilish to take. She has made it clear to Tony: the baby or me. But Tony, it turns out, is more afraid of his mother than his wife.

Eilish flees to Ireland, using her mother's 80th birthday as an excuse. She hasn't, in fact, seen her mother in decades, though she has been sure to send monthly updates on her family. Their reunion isn't exactly a happy one. Eilish's mother refuses to ask her about her life in America, and is as rude and controlling as her mother-in-law. But things begin to thaw when Eilish's children arrive. Her mother softens, taken with her daughter Rosella, and Eilish begins to see that she could have a life separate from Tony.

It is then that Eilish rekindles a romance with Jim Farwell, a local pub owner with whom Eilish had something of a fling many years before, when she had come home for her sister's funeral a secretly-married woman. She never told Jim of her elopement, and he was sure they would marry. Then she abruptly left for the US, and had no correspondence since. Complicating matters was that Jim is on the cusp of something like a new life. He, after years of bachelorhood, has found a partner in Nancy, Eilish's once-best friend, and they have decided to marry.

But Jim cannot resist Eilish, who knows nothing of his relationship with Nancy. It is something like a reversal of Eilish's previous visit. Except that Jim is eager to leave Nancy and start a new life with Eilish. It is not to be. Nancy finds out about the affair and, without letting anyone know she knows, ends it by revealing to the whole town that she and Jim are engaged. He will have to stay after all.

The back of the book describes it as "quiet", but I didn't find it that way. Perhaps it is because of my own life stage that I found it excruciatingly intense. To me, Eilish's return totally upended the lives of the people of Enniscorthy just as they were about to find some sort of peace -- just as she had done before. I wonder if the whole series is some sort of meditation on the disruption that mass emigration played on Ireland and its villages. It seems as though, in this case, it threatens to tear them apart, both because of the loss of people but also because the people who remained can't help but wonder whether they made the right decision. Just like the people who left.