She saw all three of them - Tony, Jim, her mother - as figures whom she could only damage, as innocent people surrounded by light and clarity, and circling around them was herself, dark and uncertain. The answer was that there was no answer, that nothing she could do would be right. Unlike the bookkeeping she practises, in which ultimately every detail has a proper place and all the columns, if managed correctly, add up, life is untidy:
It made her feel strangely as if she were two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother’s daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew. She wished now that she had not married him, not because she did not love him and intend to return to him, but because not telling her mother or her friends made every day she had spent in America a sort of fantasy, something she could not match with the time she was spending at home. I was more moved than I remember being by Eilis’s dilemma, too, and by her feeling of being impossibly placed between two worlds and two selves, each of which recedes or predominates depending on where she is at the moment: I certainly did like it much better than I did before. I wish I could say that on a rereading, Brooklyn was transformed for me into a book I could love. “I was expecting something urgent and illuminating to emerge from behind the cool narration,” I concluded, “and was left disappointed.” I liked The Master so much that it seemed to confirm my suspicion that this underwhelmed reaction was at least as much my fault as Tóibín’s, so I decided to give Brooklyn another try. I found the style so flatly precise it was almost plodding I thought Eilis herself was so distanced, from herself and from us, that she seemed ultimately insubstantial. When I posted about Brooklyn here before, I admitted that I might just have been reading it at the wrong time to appreciate it.
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