As Promised, Colm Toibin’s Long Island

I’m writing in bed this early Sunday morning, lightly holding a skinny Le Pen between my thumb and index finger. My right hand is cramped, though less a claw than when I awakened. Ah, modern life, when maladies become acronyms. CTS. Three letters for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, instead of three words and twenty letters. And CTS is why I am not going to open my computer to check if Tóibín’s Brooklyn was an Oprah book club selection, the way Long Island was in 2024. The Scribner hardcover beside me has Oprah’s book club circle on it. I

borrowed this $28.00 dollar copy and have kept my pen from it. My paperback copy of Brooklyn is long gone.

I do think the reading public can expect a third novel with Tóibín’s character, Eiles Lacey. The time frames of the first two fictional works are 1956 and 1976. Might a third novel also be set in 1976, given Long Island’s ending? Which is with Eiles and her two adolescent children heading home from Ireland to an Italian cul-de-sac on Long Island. This is where Tony, the husband and father lives, along with his extended Italian family, in houses built there in the late 1950s. Two decades, in other words, of being together. Now a big surprise is about to arrive in the form of an illegitimate child, one Tony fathered while on a plumbing job. Eiles has said, “No baby in this house,” and made her exit to Ireland, initially alone. The return home is for her mother’s 80^th birthday, though there has been no return to Ireland for two decades.

As I stare at the Irish name, Eiles, I hear in my head, Eye-less, with an accent at the end. For the sake of what I write today, this pronunciation fits the character. In Brooklyn, I felt sympathy for this young woman’s lessened state. It was not her choice to leave the Irish village of Enniscorthy for New York. Her mother and older sister made the decision for her. Then when Eiles returned home for her sister’s funeral, no one knows that she is married. During this visit home, she falls in love with Jim, who is more attracted to her now that she’s been to America and been enlarged from the experience. Village life, secrets and lies, and everyone knowing everything about everyone else. Eiles leaves a second time and does not come back until twenty years later.

The truth is I found the novel tahsome, as Virginia Woolf pronounced the word.  Yes, it’s clever how Tóibín works it all out, with twists and turns, involving family & lovers, the sea, things like a ring, telephone booths, the annoying Matriarch, unmarried Jim, the indominable Nancy and her determination to marry Jim. Yet Tony’s infidelity and the expectant child, welcome in the cul-de-sac of Italian Catholics, felt oddly contrived. But that’s also why a third novel with the family will be coming our way.  Having read The Magician three times, Long Island for me was a one-time read.

Next week: Leo Tolstoy’s 552 page Resurrection, recently published by Everyman’s Library.  

Let Me Tell You a Non-Literary Story

It begins with a defunct septic system. And since I did not want to be Gunga Din in drag and schlepp buckets of waste water to the woods, Mike and I headed to D.C. over Labor Day weekend to see our daughters. On Monday in Anacostia, Bonnie convinced me to watch a 2019 movie, Ford V Farrari, in which the latter company gets sold to Fiat.

This made me remember 1971, when Mike, a USAF pilot, left for Southeast Asia. Just before this, we traded in his 1967 Mercury Cougar for a new 124 Fiat sportscar. Mike carved his initials on the oil filter and told me to make sure to ask for it, so I would know the filter had been changed at the first month’s inspection. I didn’t. The very next day on a So Cal freeway, the engine light came on. A service station filled the Fiat with enough oil for me to reach a dealer in Santa Ana. Sure enough, Mike’s initials were on the filter. That dealer called the other one, and my Fiat was given a new filter and oil. But the next day I returned to the first dealer in Torrance whose manager refused to see me. What to do?  I sat in Palos Verdes at my parent’s place and typed a letter of complaint to the President of Fiat *USA. If the dealer didn’t change the filter, what else wasn’t done? Do Fiat dealers treat men this way or only women? 

What resulted? Sergio from Italy called me over a month later from San Francisco and said he was coming to see me in Napa Valley at my convenience. Which he did, a handsome young man in a lovely Italian suit and white shirt. He removed his jacket, rolled his sleeves, and told the mechanics at the Fiat dealer that he would teach them a few things. He also told them he was there on behalf of Fiat’s president in Italy. He said this lovely young teacher writes powerful letters and you would not like one written about you. When Sergio finished his inspection, he said, “Now I teach you to drive.” And we headed toward Lake Berryessa, which meant incline and curves. “Ladies kill this car,” I remember Sergio saying. “You must drive the 124 hard and fast.” And he did. Then I drove back to Napa. It was a driving lesson I’ve not forgotten.

It was that same year in 1971, returning home to Napa at 6 a.m. on an deserted freeway, when I decided to see how fast the Fiat would go. No one to hit, a Sunday morning, and I accelerated to over 100, thinking I would push the Fiat to just below the red zone of 120-140. Which is when I heard the siren and saw in my rearview mirror, the State trooper. I told him the truth. That  I’d wanted to see how it felt to really drive this car, knowing I wouldn’t endanger anyone. He kindly did not cite me for reckless driving or note my actual speed. But he said my moment of fun was going to be costly. And it was. Yet driving at that speed was exhilarating. And the movie last Monday brought back how much I loved this Fiat and regretted selling it in Napa to a young woman who was beside herself with joy to have my sportscar. What did I then drive? A yellow Datsun station wagon? We had a Chevy truck with a camper, too, and later a VW Rabbit for Mike’s tour in Germany.

Yet back in the USA, off and on for over two decades, I would see the Mazda Miata, a sportscar almost identical to the Fiat 124. I had to have one; and since 2010 I have driven a Miata in British racing green, a 2005 model, now with 145,000 miles. It cannot be driven hard and fast, but the Miata and I keep rolling along together.

I will see Ford V Farrari again, will relish the high-speed driving, enjoy Matt Damon as Carroll Shellby, and love the British actor, Christian Bale, as the famed driver, Ken Miles. The movie has an engaging screenplay, too.   Following Labor day, the Septic system was restored to use. Oh the things we take for granted until they are gone!

Next week I will  travel to Long Island  with Colm

The Magician Disappeared

How could I have returned home last Thursday from the RCC-RILL book club without the novel we discussed? Namely, Colm Tóibín’s The Magician. Now this early Sunday evening, I sit here without the book I underlined and commented on during three readings of it.  Onward, I tell myself.

Last Thursday one book club member admitted to a change of attitude regarding fiction about real persons. She had not been converted by the earlier Tóibín novel we read: The Master about Henry James. Yet Tóibín’s depiction of Thomas Mann made her a convert. That same day she went home and sent me the link to a You Tube interview with Tóibín from the Edinburgh Festival. It was one I had not seen and heard.   

https://youtu.be/S_aFqZBDarE?si=aMtk63Mom9s0Mgsw

I appreciated this interview because this delightful Irish writer talked about The Magician’s POV ( point of view ).

Although Tóibín did not discuss The Master, I will note that his novel about Henry James covers 1895-1899. Throughout this four-year time frame, Tóibín weaves in the life of James from his youth and earlier adulthood. The novel’s narration in third person reflects the complexity and eloquence of the Henry James style. I admire this novel and gained a greater appreciation of James from reading it. Yet I was not enthralled with The Master the way I was with The Magician, as if hypnotized.

Tóibín’s discussion made me understand why I felt this way. In The Magician he created an intimate third person narration without any intrusion from the author.  The character, Thomas Mann, has no foreknowledge of anything that happens, such as wars. This is to say the backstory that characterized The Master is absent from The Magician. This novel is narrated in chronological order from Lübeck in 1891 to Lübeck in 1955, the year of Mann’s 80^th birthday, when he and wife Katia (and some of the six Mann children) lived in Switzerland.

Last week I used the word “voyeur” to describe how I felt reading about Thomas Mann’s public life and his private one.  Tóibín takes the reader into whatever room or place Thomas is in. We see the world as he does.  And by Tóibín’s own admission, he cut 55,000 words from the novel.  Can that figure be correct? He also cited a famous line from Henry James about the three most important words for writing fiction.  Dramatize, repeated three times.  Which is what Mann has done in The Magician.

I will end today’s blog with four lines from the British-American poet, W.H. Auden.  He was married to Erica Mann in a passport marriage, as it were. These lines reflect Thomas Mann.

The Writer fetches/the images out/that hurt and connect/from life to art.

Next week:  Mann’s remarkable novella, Death in Venice