Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

I only discovered Colm Toibin last year when I read his superb novel, The Master, a novel about the life of Henry James. In his short, exquisitely written 2009 novel, Brooklyn, he creates such a quiet masterpiece that the reader is left wondering at the end how he did it. This novel is about a young Irish girl who leaves her home in a small village to venture to Brooklyn. The girl, Eilis, has completed a course in bookkeeping and is known to have a good head for figures, but there is no work for her in the village in which she grows up.  Through the efforts of her older sister, Rose, and a Catholic priest who takes an interest in her, she books third class passage on a ship bound for New York where she will come of age isolated from the only people she knows. 

Eilis doesn’t really want to leave her mother and sister, and yet she would not dream of telling them that as it would appear that she is ungrateful for their attempts to give her a better life.

She has already packed one case and hoped, as she went over its contents in her mind, that she would not have to open it again. It struck her on one of those nights, as she lay awake, that the next time she would open that suitcase it would be in a different room in a different country, and the thought came unbidden into her mind that she would be happier if it were opened by another person who could keep the clothes and shoes and wear them every day. She would prefer to stay at home, sleep in this room, live in this house, do without the clothes and shoes. The arrangements being made, all the bustle and talk, would be better if they were for someone else, she thought, someone like her, someone the same size and age, who maybe even looked the same as she did, as long as she, the person who was thinking now, could wake in this bed every morning and move as the day went on in these familiar streets and come home to the kitchen, to her mother and Rose.

The story of her voyage and the horrible seasickness that strikes all the third-class below-deck passengers, and of her eventual arrival at a boarding house run by a kindly Irish woman is so patiently and slowly told that is almost as if it is only between the lines that the reader learns of her terrible homesickness. Again, Eilis is unwilling and unable to express her loneliness even in letters home, since to do so would make her seem ungrateful for all that has been done for her. 

Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.

Already my rendering of the story is much more sentimental than Toibin’s. Even the pathos of the story is so patiently and quietly spun out and the language so plain and simple that the tremendous emotional effect comes almost as a surprise. 

Although the story develops very slowly, it does build to a kind of climax and with an element of mystery in it that I would not think of divulging to you. 

The only novel I can compare this with in terms of its quiet profundity is Julian Barnes’ masterpiece, The Sense of an Ending. Despite the loneliness and homesickness of Eilis, and the fears that lurk just below the surface, this is also an uplifting and positive work. In many ways a historical novel about old New York, I believe readers will remember it most for its intricate portrayal of a young woman caught between two worlds, or as The New Yorker put it in a review:

Toibin creates a narrative of remarkable power, writing with a spareness and intensity that give the minutest shades of feeling immense emotional impact…Purging the immigrant novel of all swagger and sentimentality, Toibin leaves us with a renewed understanding that to emigrate is to become a foreigner in two places at once.

This is probably the best book I have read so far this year, and I have read a lot of excellent novels. I think you will love it for its slow intensity and its intricate detail about a lived life.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

In honor of Black History month, I want to talk to you about an author I suspect most of you (even the avid readers) have not heard of, Nella Larson, and her short but powerful novel, Quicksand. Associated historically with the group of artists grouped together as the Harlem Renaissance, I suspect that this novel made a lot of people, both people of color and white, quite uncomfortable. The title is singularly appropriate, for Helga Crane saw her life (and the lives of many, perhaps most) Blacks as lives caught and slowly sinking into Quicksand—lives in which even the struggle to get out, get ahead, get going was destined to pull people down, snaring and suffocating them mentally and spiritually.

Helga has a Danish mother and an African-American father, and from early on feels that she belongs nowhere. The reader picks up her life when she is twenty-two and teaching at a well-respected Negro school. She is engaged to another teacher, and thought of highly by the school’s president, but she is profoundly unhappy and thinking of leaving her position. She had that afternoon “had to listen to the banal, the patronizing and even insulting remarks of one of the renowned white preachers of the state,” and that speech along with her daily routines have brought her close to a decision to resign from her post.

This was, he had told them with obvious sectional pride, the finest school for Negroes anywhere in the country, north or south; in fact, it was better even than a great many schools for white children. And he had dared any Northerner to come south and after looking at this great institution to say that the Southerner mistreated the Negro. And he said that if all Negroes would only take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct themselves in the manner of the Naxos products, there would be no race problem, because Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. They had good sense and they had good taste. They knew enough to stay in their places, and that, said the preacher, showed good taste. 

Helga’s answer to this is “No forever!”  And though she has very little money or prospects, she decides to leave the school and her fiancé, in spite of the president’s attempt to keep her there, telling her she is just the sort of person the school needs. Her fiancé, who feels fortunate to have a position in the school remains, and Helga trains north to make a living in whatever way she can. She is frankly and deeply confused by the whole issue of color.

For the hundredth time she marveled at the gradations within this oppressed race of hers. A dozen shades slide by. There was sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry white. There was yellow hair, brown hair, black hair: straight hair, straightened hair, curly hair, crinkly hair., wooly hair. She saw black eyes in white faces, brown eyes in yellow faces, gray eyes in brown faces, blue eyes in tan faces....

Of course, life in the north is no better; besides the meaningless service jobs she has to accept, she also has to deal with men who want to save her. Finally, through happenstance, she finds a way to go to Denmark, and for a while things seem much better. Living there with an aunt, she is more than accepted into the community, but as a kind of exotic novelty. She is even courted by a famous artist who expects her to swoon when he offers marriage, “But you see, Herr Olsen, I’m not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white man. I don’t at all care to be owned, even by you.”

Finally, surprising even herself, she returns to America, though she dreads it. Without telling too much more of the story, I will tell you that she finally goes through an existential crisis, and for a short time decides that religion is the answer for her. She marries a preacher, has children and is soon engulfed in that life of mothering, though she very soon loses respect for the adored-by-others preacher.

No happy endings here; after an illness that almost kills her, and with a dawning awareness that religion is not the answer, that she must find a better more rebellious way, “…hardly has she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child.”

Yes, this is a sad little book, but I think a profound one.

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

I want to talk to you this morning about a superb novel of ideas by Ian McEwan, Enduring Love. He might also have named it obsessive love, for it turns out to be an examination of a form of erotomania, named after the French psychiatrist De Clerambault. But more generally, it is (like his earlier novel, Black Dogs) an analysis of the the psychological division and tension between clear, cool reason and emotions such as rage, love and faith. McEwan’s brother holds a PhD and professorship in philosophy, and as you readers must know, McEwan is much interested in science, as is made manifest in his novels Solar and Saturday. What he often casts as a conflict between two characters, say a no-nonsense realist and an advocate of blind faith, is, I think, a struggle McEwan has with himself, between the black dogs of hard reason and emotion. In this particular novel he offers many fascinating asides on psychology of belief (especially religious belief), the reliability of memory and even of immediate experience via the senses.

Because the novel is also a mystery of sorts in which the tension builds gradually and inexorably, I don’t intend to say much about the actual story. Suffice it to say that like Saturday, the novel begins explosively with an event that shocks and shatters the observers; in this case the sudden appearance of a helium balloon that comes to ground in a large field on the outskirts of London, witnessed by a number of observers who race to the scene to try to rescue the balloonist and his grandson who is still inside the basket. Wind gusts threaten to relaunch the balloon and take it over an escarpment and possibly into overhanging power lines. Five men struggle to keep the balloon grounded until the boy can be rescued, but as it becomes airborne again, one by one they release the ropes they are hanging to in their vain attempt to keep it grounded. One of the men, Joe Rose, is tormented by guilt about finally letting his rope go in order to save his life. Another man hangs on even when the others have let go in order to save themselves; alone, there is no chance that he can bring the balloon to ground again, but by the time he cannot any longer retain his grip on the rope, he is too high and plunges to his death as the others look on helplessly.

As always, the story, itself, is gripping, but I was much more interested in the questions McEwan raises about memory and perception, philosophical and psychological questions that his character Joe Rose raises as he struggles with his own guilt feelings, and tries to deal also with being the object of an obsessive and irrational love from one of the other would be rescuers. As Joe reflects on the reliability of memory, he descends into a kind of Cartesian skepticism regarding not only memory, but also of so-called direct perception.

No one could agree on anything. We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favor, and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy. We’re descended from the indignant passionate tellers of half-truths, who, in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced ourselves…when it didn’t suit us, we couldn’t agree on what was in front of us.

And further:

Neuroscientists report that the subjects asked to recall a scene while under a magnetic resonance imaging scanner show intense activity in the visual cortex, but what a sorry picture memory offers, barely a shadow, barely in the realm of sight, the echo of a whisper.

Kant may have been the first philosopher to point out that, contrary to common belief, memory is not like a camera;  it is not a reproductive faculty, but more a creative one. He calls it a synthetic faculty that essentially makes up a narrative from the very limited data offered. While the memory may become sharper with repeated tellings, that is not due to an ability to analyze the memory (say for more detail), but a supposed clarity or certainty that simply becomes more fixed with each retelling, no matter how true to reality the memory is. Memory is less a picture of the past than a drawing or painting.

Those in the grips of Clerambault’s Syndrome take even denial of reciprocity form the loved one as a kind of signal of repressed or hidden love. Facial gestures or completely innocent actions by the beloved are taken as signs of love; nothing can count as counter evidence to the obsessed lover.

Another line of the story not mentioned yet, but pivotal to the action is the effect the obsession has on the love between Joe and his partner Clara. She eventually comes to doubt Joe’s claims about being followed by Parry and receiving letters and phone calls. When he tells her of his research into the syndrome, and tries to warn her of Impending danger, she is dismissive in her replies. “You think you can read your way out of this…Don’t you realize you’ve got a problem?”

Will the heretofore strong and passionate love Clara and Joe have shared survive this intervention in their lives? Will it survive Joe’s obsession with his stalker? These and other questions in this intriguing mystery story readers will have to answer for themselves.

I’m not sure how I missed this novel written in 90s; I thought I had read all of McEwan, but I was delighted to have come across it, and I recommend it to you as one of his best.