It offers an anatomy of homesickness that is both compassionate and life affirming.Įilis Lacey, the novel’s heroine, wants to do right by all of the people she loves, but any choice she makes will cause damage to someone. As someone who has suffered innumerable bouts of homesickness since leaving The United States for Ireland in 1993, I felt soothed in reading it. It is, in its artfully fictitious way, as therapeutic as a really good self-help book. But unlike so much modern fiction, Brooklyn offers a potential way forward, an exit strategy from the perpetual regret and reconsideration brought on by most moral and emotional conundrum. Few clearly correct options present themselves to the central character who maintains our sympathy because of the emotionally fraught situation in which she finds herself. Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn operates, like so much of modern fiction, on planes of moral ambiguity and relativism.
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