Long Island
The plot may sound like the stuff of soap operas, but Mr. Tóibín is essentially a dramatist of repression ... It’s a tricky thing, producing a novel from a style this muted and undemonstrative ... The confrontations between these people, so long delayed, feel momentous and hugely affecting. These pendant novels, I think, will be the fiction for which this wonderful writer is best remembered.
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The characters in Long Island are constantly cautioning themselves not to say anything, for fear of upsetting that fine balance that exists in intimacy as much as in community. But not saying is an act with consequences, too — one that Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.
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...the rare instance in which a sequel is every bit as good as the original ... As always, Tóibín's narrative restraint heightens tension and allows readers to fill in the blanks. We marvel at his skill as we watch his characters in Long Island become ensnared in the elaborate web of strategically withheld information and calculated partial truths he has them spin ... Tóibín handles these uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging back and forth through time to build to a devastating climax. The tragedy of this novel about the universality of longing is that, even 25 years on, Eilis, however decisive, is still not in control of her own life.
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