REVIEW #40: THE PENGUIN LESSONS – THE HUMOROUS AND THE HATEFUL IN OUR HUMANITY
April 21, 2025Brooklyn
By Colm Tóibín
Penguin Books Ltd., 2009
It was a strange experience reading a book, when you have already seen the movie. However, I found the conclusion of the movie far more satisfying than the book, since the protagonist, Eilis Lacey, was able to return to her new love in Brooklyn without the sense of ambivalence that had held her in thrall from the start of their relationship. Having experienced the upheaval of her heart in the sudden and unexpected rush of feelings for a young man from her hometown in Ireland and the pangs of grief at the loss of her sister and the grief of losing, once again, all that was familiar to her, Eilis is shaken out of her complacency and is able to return to Brooklyn and see it as her new home. Moreover, she realizes that Tony’s love is her new home. It is both the protective cocoon and the promise of a new life with all the challenges of a new world in the grandiose melting pot of America. Without returning to her old life in Ireland, she was not able to move confidently into her new life and new love.
Tóibín captures many things perfectly. Irish society. Small-town life. Gossip. Social hierarchies. The uniqueness of cultures. The crashing, crushing waves of culture shock. The tension between the old life and the new. Homesickness that colours everything, until the new place becomes home and takes its place in your heart. The fickleness of human beings and the mysterious force that is at the centre of our relationships, pushing and prodding us and causing us to say and do things that are inexplicable, even to ourselves. All these and more are at the heart of this novel. Tóibín holds both of Eilis’s relationships as tenderly as day old chicks, exposing the vulnerability of Tony and Jim and the isolation of Eilis as she seeks to understand them ─ and herself ─ without anyone to guide, or reassure, her.
BROOKLYN DEMONSTRATES THE EXTREME INTENSITY AND FICKLENESS OF FEELINGS AND THE PAUCITY OF LANGUAGE IN EXPRESSING THEM.
For me, it is what is left unsaid that is the most powerful aspect of Tóibín’s writing. He doesn’t have the beauty and symbolism of F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are few allusions like Margaret Atwood’s tales. There is little archeological digging into the socio-historical moment like Hilary Mantel. I didn’t want to reread sentences or passages just to let the beauty of them wash over me or take me into philosophical or historical milieux that would apply another layer of meaning. Instead, this novel moved me by its silence. By Tóibín’s understanding that what is felt deeply cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Feelings well up in his characters and wash over us through the absence of words. Or even through actions that speak more loudly about the emotion driving them than any open conversation could. When Mrs Kehoe locks the gate to Eilis’s basement room (after Eilis had invited Tony in and they had made love there for the first time), it was clear to Eilis that the lock was in response to her betraying Mrs Kehoe’s trust by taking a young man to her room. Even though nothing was said directly, the icy silence the following morning over breakfast and Mrs Kehoe’s announcement: ‘I am going to keep the basement locked in future…You wouldn’t know who would be going down there’ conveyed Mrs Kehoe’s disapproval more loudly than any confrontation.
When Eilis breaks the news to her mother that she would be returning to Brooklyn, again Tóibín understands the depth of feeling that motivates her mother going to bed early and refusing to get up and face that goodbye in the morning. There is a devastating sense of defeat that she must live with the loss of two daughters, one who has died and the other who has chosen, for a second time, to leave her and start a new life in a far-away land. Such emotion is beyond words. No conversation is equal to it. I really liked that about this novel.
There was also a terrible understanding that love hurts. Whether that love is familial, or the love of passionate attraction, one must be prepared for the pain that only love is capable of evoking and enduring. Tóibín understands that language cannot express it adequately and we feel it all the more deeply because it lies hidden below the turbulent waves and is not brought to the surface using words that are not equal to that swirling, heaving, inner sea of emotions.
It is rare for a movie to match, or even surpass, a novel, but I recommend the movie as strongly as the novel, especially for anyone who has crossed the sea to start a new life.