One Book, One Chicago

This week, Chicago author Patrick Somerville, whose novel The Cradle is a favorite of ours here at the library, muses from an author’s perspective on how stories end.

What are endings? It seems like the answer to the question is obvious, as we know a good one when we see one and likewise know a bad one when we feel that sinking feeling, or when we frown a little in confusion, or when we find ourselves thinking things like: this is really what happens? Or: they’re (the story-makers) really going to end it like this?  Sometimes it feels unfair. Knowing a good ending from a bad one, though, is a lot easier than defining what makes endings work, or why they work, or why we tend to place such importance on them.

I find the ending of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn to be just about perfect. When I closed the book, I didn’t know what it was that had worked so well in those final pages, and instead of trying to reverse engineer it all, as half-cocked writers are sometimes prone to do, I just let myself steep in the pleasure of how skillfully Tóibín manages to dramatize Eilis’s frustrating and bittersweet dilemma. On the one hand, America is terribly hard, but Tóibín keeps her there just long enough to let Eilis establish a new life for herself. What’s more, this new life has great potential.  Isn’t it fair to say that more growth is possible for our heroine—in terms of her career, in terms of her personal freedoms—in Brooklyn than in Enniscorthy?

Then again, home is home, and we’ve watched that same freedom, which audiences in the contemporary West tend to root for as an unequivocally great thing, knock Eilis around, leave her feeling lost. So another part of me wanted her to stay within the safe confines of Enniscorthy—for her mother’s sake, yes, but stay for herself, too. Home offers the same old constraints, but they’re the same, they’re knowable, they can be managed and controlled. They might grind on you, but they won’t grind you down to dust.

The ending of Brooklyn comes down to a choice. And yet that choice carries with it all the deep complexities of the world Eilis has been exposed to since she began to lose control over her decisions very early in the book. It’s a deeply real choice in that either option inflicts great pain on somebody, and both options will result in pain for Eilis. Novelists work for years to get their characters to such focused, dramatic, and meaningful precipices. On the one hand, simple. On the other, not at all. Alongside it, a question: What will she do?

If Tóibín were a different kind of writer, now would have been the time to find some hybrid resolution, some secret passageway of unexpected events to allow Eilis to escape her dilemma unscathed. Jim Farrell would have a terrible, dark secret (murdered his cousin with a trowel twelve years ago?), and Tony would move to Ireland, punch him, and create a successful house-building business there. Or perhaps Eilis, in a moment of exceptional eloquence, would make a tremendous speech in the public square, and her mother would agree to move to Brooklyn. Rose, you see, left behind a secret fortune in golf winnings, buried in a sand trap on the 16^th hole, and it’s enough money to buy a nice Park Slope brownstone whose value will increase by a factor of 30 by the year 2010! 

Tóibín is not like that.

Endings are exciting; endings provide us with resolution and help us to understand what the future holds for characters we’ve come to care about. But they’re also nudges that remind us of what stories have been about all along—they help us look back through events and interpret the experience one last time. Brooklyn is a story of emigration and immigration, and the story of a certain time in Irish and American life. Because of its closing act, though, I left the book thinking it’s also a book about the profound sadness and impossible choices that leaving one’s homeland will automatically create. And true to life, Tóibín honors that sadness by leaving it alone and showing it for what it is: complicated and painfully definitive. Eilis has to choose, and she does. She will regret it, in ways, just as she would have regretted the opposite decision.

Nevertheless, after the choice and after the book, life goes on. What’s more true than that?

This week’s guest discussion leader is the esteemed Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey.

Does Eilis fall in love with Tony or with Tony’s family?  Tony is her first serious boyfriend.  Unlike Eilis’ last experience at the dancehall in Enniscorthy where Jim Farrell ignored her, Tony pursues Eilis with a wide open appeal, but he’s not too forward.  Just enough to make him interesting.  He’s exotic because he’s Italian and not Irish, but he’s Catholic like she is , he’s a “good boy” and he comes from a large family.

Eilis’ family is scattered.  Her father dead.  Her mother and sister in Ireland; her brothers in England.  The Lacey family is reserved in speech and in showing emotion, compared with Tony’s family which is boisterous and demonstrative.  The Fiorellos share a cramped one bedroom apartment but they have their eye on the future and it is within their grasp.  Instinctively, their plans fit within Eilis’ own – her plan to attend Brooklyn College and to become a bookkeeper.  No one in Tony’s family thinks that is unusual; on the contrary it’s very American.

Does Eilis fall in love with Tony because his family provides her with the closeness she lacks in her life both in America and back home?  Or because he’s the first boy who has ever noticed her for herself ?

This week’s insights into Brooklyn come from Michael Patrick Thornton, director, actor, and founder of The Gift Theatre in Chicago. Michael can be found on ABC playing Dr. Gabriel Fife on “Private Practice” and onstage at The Gift in Suicide, Inc. He co-directed a staged reading for this Spring’s One Book, One Chicago celebration of Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín.

While Eilis Lacey is the novel’s central character into whose mind we are given third person limited peekings, we can’t really call her the protagonist, can we? Decisions are made for her (if anything, Fr. Flood is arguably the protagonist, the one who consistently sets things in motion, e.g. her trip to America, a new policy of dances for the parish at which she meets Tony, etc., etc.) and, reacting with quiet passivity to most of the events around her, Eilis ends up devastating people in her life, not least among them herself.

We can equivocate and commiserate her nature through context: her unique blend of country, religion, gender, and era, and yet, at the end of the day Eilis is still aggravating to me. Aggravating and attractive. She is someone who has allowed herself to be locked into a life just before learning how to live, whose quietude allows her to play a number of roles effectively until time and place conflate and Reality forms from such compression, forcing Eilis to deal with the consequence of her actions.

And yet, of course, what could she have done? Refuse her mother, sister, and Fr. Flood? Certainly not. ‘Refusing’ wasn’t an option, since in the silence, the decision’s made for her: (from the novel: “In the silence that had lingered, she realized, it had somehow been tacitly arranged that Eilis would go to America.”) Let’s look at two words in that exquisite sentence: ‘Tacitly’: not spoken. ‘Somehow’: this has happened in a way incomprehensible/imperceptible to Eilis, in a way she missed. Whether because they know she won’t speak up to voice her opinion or if she does it will not matter or if because back then (60 years ago) you didn’t question authority, here’s the fact, Jack: They don’t even ask her. She must be terrified coming to America. She must feel shamed and silly and out of place. I understand why she has nightmares. And sometimes silence is the best armor.

But at a certain point, life demands we act decisively. Character-defining crossroads appear, wants collide with perceived needs, dreams beckon our better angels from our mind’s servitude to ‘reality’, and if we suppress our wants long enough—if we consistently choose living politely over living truthfully—then we are going to leave carnage in the wake of our fearfully muted wants.

This, to me, is a cost of inaction. She whose goal is to please all and make no waves will hurt all and cause tsunamis. The tragedy of Eilis, to me, is that her life is set in stone before she gets a chance to know herself. I blame her for this. I love her for this. She holds a mirror up to us all.

Is Eilis a character of inaction? If not, why not? If yes, what to you are the costs of inaction?

This week’s post is from Annie Tully, coordinator of One Book, One Chicago at the Chicago Public Library.

It is the early 1950’s in Ireland when Eilis Lacey begins to pack her bags for America. She is assured of a job when she gets to Brooklyn, a place to stay, even one social connection—to a parish priest. However, neither she, nor her mother, nor her sister Rose know when she might return, if at all. There are no plans to come home at Christmas or Easter. There are no attempts to schedule regular Sunday evening phone calls to catch up. Occasionally there might be a letter. Eilis’s three brothers have already gone to England for work, and with their departure the Lacey house became a place of mourning just as much as after the death of their father.

Now, imagine a similar situation today. Eilis Lacey must move away. She hasn’t been to Brooklyn yet but Google Earth showed her an image of her new home and neighborhood and she’s emailed some future co-workers already who seem very nice. She and her mother and her siblings—all of them—would most likely make plans for frequent visits to each other and back home to mom. Dates would be set to suit all schedules, flights would be booked. Phone calls would occur frequently and without thought to anything aside from time zones. Facebook connections would be made, photos shared in seconds via text message. A brother would tweet about a difficult day, a sister would send an emoticon :-) in return.

How do connections today—as frequent and varied as they are—compare to the spare connections of sixty years ago? Those letters from home or from her brother Jack were so treasured by Eilis Lacey. Would the same be true today of emails, blog postings, or texts? (The irony of raising these questions in an online forum are not lost on me, rest assured.) Would Eilis be just as homesick today? And what about departures, Eilis’s in particular? Was she thinking about when she might return? Do we, today, think as much of possibly never seeing a loved one again when we know they are a touch screen away?