Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, Michael sits down for a chat with one of Ireland's most beloved writers, Colm Toyben. As usual, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a bit more about the episode.
Hi Michael, Hello Ruby.
So Michael, I know that you have been a big fan of Colm Toyben's work for many years. But what was the first book that you read by him and what made you fall in love with his writing.
It's true, Ruby, I adore Column Tobin, and I think maybe I've read everything he's written. I first read him when I was only thirteen, when his book The Heather Blazing came out in the early nineties. And even though it was a book that was about old age and regret and memory and being emotionally repressed from your family and all of that kind of stuff, for some reason, thirteen year old me absolutely fell in love with it.
It was one of those books that opened my teenage reading up to adult possibility on the page, and I followed him through everything that he's done since, and in that period since, he's really built a reputation as one of the foremost practitioners in the English language. Books like The Master, which is his telling of Henry James's life, or The Magician, which is about Thomas Mann. He writes his big, kind of sweeping books. But then he also returns again and again to the town where he grew up,
a place called Enna Scorthy. It's there and they have a blazing It's there in his wonderful book Nora a Webster, and is there in the book for which maybe his most famous, and that's Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was not only a massive success, but it got adapted into an equally acclaimed film of the same name, sarrying Ssharonan and dom Hall Gleeson. And this new book Long Island is a sequel, isn't it.
Yeah, that's right. So Brooklyn was the story of Eilish Lacey. She was this young woman who leaves island for the US. She's kind of finding growing up in small town Island incredibly claustrophobic, and so she thinks about the possibility of the new world and moves to Brooklyn falls in love with this guy called Tony Fiorello, a young plumber, and when she's called back home to Ireland because her sisters died, she and Tony quickly get married in City Hall before
she comes back. But the drama of that book is that on returning home, she finds herself slipping back into her old life. The old rhythms are possible. New romance with this guy called Jim Farrell, her friendship with Nancy, her fraught relationship with her mother, all of that kind of takes hold again. And so Brooklyn's about that decision she has to make about whether to return to the new world and her new life with Tony or whether
to stick with the old. Long Island is set decades later, and we see Eilish Lacey living in Long Island with Tony. She's an American now, she's a mother with a couple of kids. But when the action picks up, it opens with Eilish being accosted by an angry neighbor whose wife is pregnant to Tony. It's a gripping raid and I just adored and adore talking to.
Common coming up in just a moment the Long Island of Colmtoymen.
Yeah, I was having thoughts or I was having something about four that the idea of writing a novel which would be plot led plot lead means that every single thing must move as an arrow moves towards some sort of point, and that if you're not doing that, it would the scene you will attempt to write, For example, if you deviate for a second and give people extra feelings or extra scenes or moments between two characters, that will fall away as you the author reads the book,
but it's not needed that you're following what normally has been reading taken over, I suppose, but the detective writer that everything really must move, even if ingeniously or not directly, but it must move towards a point. And so that
that was really the aim in Long Island. And you see, the word sequel only came up when the book was delivered and people were trying to work out how we're going to place this book, what's going to the jacket was and the word sequel started And I hadn't really put a thought into it in the way that you often don't put it thought into something for good reasons, because you're avoiding thinking about it. And the problem is that this has been the most successful book of my commercially.
So here am I jumping on the bandwagon and riding it was a retired horse to death.
I suppose.
The first thing is that I got a lot of energy from the film. And I know that a lot of writers have had nightmares of having their work completely destroyed by some awful script writer and director. And I saw the film a lot in a short sp of time, and I had to grow up at the stage and say something about it. So I would always just sit
in the centiment and watch it. And those things end up having a big effect on you, because of course it's your own emotions to start with, taking over by someone and then given back to you, and that's a very powerful business.
Yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, one of the things that struck me about the film as an adaptation is the end hits a couple of different beats or a couple of different notes to the ones that you did yourself in the novel, And mainly about Elisha and her decisions, mainly about how active and how clear she is on the decision to go with Tony and be back in Brooklyn and gives that kind of gives that much more solid idea about this is where I belong to.
This is whereas the novel, as I remember it, is far more elliptical about how she's feeling about all of that.
Oh, and it is kind of ambivuous. She doesn't really know how to do. She drifts and she's forced back in the novel. The film wanted to give her more agency, as they call it, than I wanted to give her. But I'm a sucker for that very last scene, which I didn't write. Nick Hornby wrote it, where she's across the road and Tony comes out of it a shop.
They've been doing some work with his brother.
His brothers sees her first, and then they see each other, and I just cheer up, because, you know, because I couldn't write that.
That question of Eilish's agency is kind of central to the ways in which she has changed and grown as a character in the intervening decades between the two books. Some of the readings of her as a protagonist in Brooklyn would have it that she was passive. I don't think that's quite right, but she was certainly circumspect, and as we find her in Long Island. She has more grit, She is sharper, she is far more directive in her life.
Was that a deliberate decision in terms of how you were going to characterize her twenty years on?
Yea that, in other words, she can't be dreamy.
In the previous book, she drifted along, she went with things, she went with the flow, and people liked her and looked after her. But she didn't come to America to take New York. But now she's built a castle in the sense she's made a family. She's had two children, and even though you know there are a problem, but the in laws, they're not great problems.
She's got a wonderful relationship with her children.
And just before the opening of the book, he realized that, well, she has just built her world.
There's this wonderful early scene where, having been too forthright at one of her in law's big family lunches, kind of horrifyingly, there is an outsider watching people talk all over each other, watching these rituals to which she barely belongs. She's too forthright, and then by mutual agreement no longer attends them, and there's a wonderful scene that comes out of that where she gets the Sunday New York Times for herself, and that opens up this entirely different existence.
Yeah, there's a funny thing happened in suburbs and in provincial places in the late sixties early seventies is that women who were not involved actively and openly with feminism, feminism.
Swept in under their doors in some way. You know.
It came in the letter box, it came through the television, of course, the radio, but it happened at home.
It happened in our house where my.
Mother moved from a newspaper called The arsh Press, which really wasn't very good to the Irish Times, which was considered sort of Protestant liberal newspaper in Ireland and had really good coverage of the arts and really very well written articles, and it was obviously it was the intellectual paper. And my mother started to first well, swap it with the neighbor, but then she decided to get it herself. It was a very big move and I think it
changed things in the house. And it's almost unimaginable now because of course people can just go online and find everything. But those things were very big changes that occurred families in the nineteen seventies.
I'm interested in what you're saying about the castle that Alish has created in the family. One of the things that's so touching in those early scenes, even though we see them filtered through the animating disaster that sets the plot into sequence, is that not just Elish, but Tony's also a really good parent. Like the two of them have what seems to be very lovely relationships with their
very nice children. All of that is delivered in a way that is devoid of kind of false drama or friction or tension.
Yeah, you see, it was Tony's already been demonized at the opening of the books. You'd be very careful not to go on with that, not to kick him when he's down, as it were. So therefore, he particularly has a relationship with his daughter, and he's had since she was a baby. And he's one of those fathers, you know, who just can't stop looking at their chatter daughter. So you know, that's very important that that that bond is there.
You know what happens that the openly that I was a big blow simply because we're tak he about simple happiness, but a simple happiness that agis has created very, very carefully, and sorry, yeah, I was interested in all that.
How important is it that the bearer of the news about Tony's infidelity is an Irishman rather than an American or an Italian? Or how much does it matter that it's a shouting Irishman who sets the thing off?
It matters enormously because I can't write American dialogue and there we are. You know what I mean?
In other words, what would an American's anger be like? What words would he use? And also what's his own background? Because it would matter enormously. Is he, for example, is he from the Midwest? Is he local?
Is he? What is he? I would have no idea.
I would get one word wrong, and in getting one word wrong, I would get the sort of grammar of the moment wrong. The important thing is she has to be able to judge is he saying something he means? Is he saying something true? Is he threatening? Are his threats empty? She has to be able to read that. Now, how do you read that? If you're in such a foreign country, It's very hard to interpret all that.
That question of foreignness and of speaking a different language runs right through this book, as it did with Brooklyn. You know, you've named both of these novels after the tellosmanic place where she makes a new home in America. But actually, weirdly, Brooklyn is quite absent from Brooklyn, and Long Island is largely absent from Long Island. Why did you send her those places in the naming of the books.
Yes, she doesn't experience Brooklyn, you know. In other words, it's happened. It's happened with so many people. The emigrant experience is so much about missing things, not just missing home that that's an easy thing to work out.
Yeah, they miss home.
But missing what's actually happening in this sort of texture and flavor of the place. I think it happens with a young woman more because she's not going to be feel free in the streets or the bars or the
steams in the same way. But Long Island's what Tony promised her, And it happened where I was in the choir in a Catholic the Catholic church, I think it was the upper west Side around eighty sixth Street on the west side, and the church was completely Irish Catholic, except there were no there were no Irish people left.
I said that the priest to, of course, was Hispanic. And where did all the Irish go? Ho?
They went out of the island, out of Long Island, you know, in the in the Greats, those funny migrations in cities. People might have gone from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn, and the next generation wanted a garden, and they went, they went to Long Island.
It's also significant that she's in a culder sac that in many ways mirrors the curtain twitching kind of existence that she was so keen to escape. They scrutinized every time you step out the front door, her sisters in law standing in the doorway one at a time, so they're not making up the numbers that they'll be noticed. It's kind of very funny the way all of that stuff is observed.
Yeah, again, it's suited by darker purpose.
Tony promises her this, they're going to build four houses, and that's what they do.
They build four houses.
But of course it meets means for me, and don't have to worry too much about it, you know, and like what day does she visit her mother? And none of they're all gathered together, so it just made it much easier if they were all living there, so they could all encroach on her at various times and not others. You see, the problem with the Long Island thing is that it's very thin in the sense that she's married, she's got two kids.
That's her world. She doesn't go to arsh bar, she.
Isn't involved in lookal politics. It's just even in the library. She goes to work. But again, you can only get a certain amount out of the job or the house.
So I needed one more drama.
And the drama course is the drama of Tony's family is the drama of another enclave.
Again, it has to come. I feel careful with it.
Her mother in law has to be very kind and decent in a whole lot of different ways. And you know there's nobody in making her an over. But the two women do have a particular problem over what issue. And alishcomes from this nonchalant, drifting, passive circuspect figure.
She becomes right stubborn on one matter.
From a craft perspective, one of the things that's so astonished me in Long Island is how well you manage to create a sense of her purpose and of her character while at the same time denying us too much interiority. And maybe it's a function of the way in which you approach plot in this book, or maybe it's a function of the fact that once she does get back to Ireland, you move into a kind of polyphonic mode where we get different perspectives driving the narrative at different times.
But was that a very deliberate decision not to have us in her head wallowing with the kind of the angst and the personal dilemma.
The problem is that if you do that, you can do it once. You can't then do it twice. You can't have it again and again and again. You know, on Monday she felt this thing towards Tony. She went over in her mind what she knew, Well, what did she do on Tuesday? And so you can have that to a certain extent, but what she does becomes more
important than what she thinks. But I had to soften that a bit because there's a moment where she goes out onto Jones Beach and she goes for a walk and suddenly she realizes that or the reader realizes that her own life has become a sort of set of memories that it isn't merely a new experience after new experience, that the business of being on that beach with those kids when they were small, with Tony, when they were just married, that all of that has become very soft
and now suddenly sharp memory for her. She suddenly has put down roots in memory on Long Island, which she certainly wasn't where she'd done before. So I thought that was what I would do, rather than have her constantly going into her thoughts for two pages, because I felt that those tots are pretty circumscribed in the book in the sense that she is recovering from what she's heard
about Tony. She is remembering various things that happened with Tony's family to see piecing together how she has ended like this.
On Long Island before she.
Will go just so that when she's back in Ireland, you have an extra underplot, which is not merely what she sees in Ireland, but that there is a past now that will some way pull her back towards American.
Coming up after the break column shares the American cultural forces that have shaped his work, from James Baldwin to well, You're not going to guess the second one. Toybin has in other interviews expressed this fear that sequels are typically disappointing. To my mind. Long Island escapes that curves very effectively because it stands on its own as a propulsive, charming, thoughtful novel, but more importantly for the legions of fans
of Brooklyn, because it's not a retread. When Ailish returns to Ireland, the characters from Brooklyn who she left behind have built on their own lives and moved on in
different ways. More crucially, given that Brooklyn culminated in a love triangle of sorts, Jim, the other man who she might have ended up with, has pieced together his life after being left behind, running a bar and beginning a relationship with Ailish's old friend Nancy, and a big part of how toy Bin departs from Brooklyn in Long Island is is decision to give sections of the novel to both Jim and Nancy so that we might hear their perspective on events and understand what they have at stake.
Because she's been away, there's so many things she doesn't know, And how do you work with the reader when the reader needs to know something that Edie doesn't know. Now you can tell the reader as the author, and this doesn't work. The reader gets tired of being told things. So therefore I realize the best way to try this was to try it from three sides. In other words, you would have a big chunk at the beginning from
Alien's respective. You would move then to part two and you would have Oh, someone called Nancy, and the reader, I would hope, seems oddly satisfied. Oh, I know Aleish, I know why she's home. I know the whole story. Nancy doesn't know the whole story. And then you realize,
but what you've told about Nancy, Alish doesn't know. So his business of not knowing becomes I think almost the subject of the book, or the effort to make a secret energy in the book is who knows what but mainly who doesn't know what but the reader always knows.
How important is that structurally as a way to approach characters who, for one reason or another are repressing both their feelings and their desires.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure there's that much repression in the sense that you're dealing with ninety seventy six, so you're dealing with theid in Ireland where you could still have a long engagement when people got engaged before they got married, and so you're dealing with the whole business that since Nancy's daughter is engaged, Nancy doesn't want to announce her engagement because we're cut across her daughter. So then a novel depends on that secret, which is
really done out of good manners. It's done out of just not wanting to upset the daughter, rather than being done out of any sort of you know, repression. For example, the Catholic Church plays almost no part in the book. There's a nice priest, he just helped people get married and does those things waves and you know, everyone goes to Mass, but there's no big Catholic sort of repression in the world.
You're right, maybe repression is too loaded a word, particularly in an Irish context, but I guess I mean kind of stifled, you know. Jim. Jim is a man who has lived his life kind of bettening down big feelings because he's kind of in a constant state of mortification.
Yeah, but it's also that he owns a bar.
Because if you own a bar and you've got a reputation a gossip, people wouldn't like that. So you behind the bar, you hear everything. You're moving back and forth. He's been there all his life. He's father was there before him, just watching everything, making sure that everything's okay, but saying nothing. What I've got to do with them, then is to treat him like a character from Jane Austen.
So he has all that stuff in the bar downstairs.
But he goes upstairs at night, and he's on his own in that big house, and he's got a big room to sit, and he can drink and any amount of gin he wants, and he's uneasy in his solitude. And what he really wants is he's a man who wants to get married, who should be sharing his bed with the woman.
And therefore it's not a problem.
When Nancy comes along, even though they've known another other lives, but she seems so lively and so ready for life and so filled with things, and so there's absolutely no problem. They're in their forties, they're going to get married, and this is again another sort of moment of perfection. Jim is going to have his problems solved by this very busy woman who's Nancy. And then you can come in under that where the first already begins to impinge on the stay.
When you describe it that way, it makes me see you as much more the monster than i'd originally kind of conceived you.
Well, what I'm interested in doing is dramatizing, and for dramatization, I need disruption. And therefore you could use the word monster, but you can also use the word novelist.
They're interchangeable terms. I'm convinced of that. I think in many ways this might be your funniest book. Bits of it absolutely tickled me in ways that I was just delighted by sequences. Particularly Ailish's mother has a wonderful turn of phrase when she's furious at the idea of an eightieth birthday party and is gleefully talking about the neighbor who drank too much gin and lemonade and died the next day.
Yes, she died of a birthday party. One day it was gin and tonic and the next day was a hers.
But there's a scene towards the end which is so pretty important for the book, and I was hesitant about it, depressed, but for it it's the only idea of someone getting married a second time, and Ali's mother has a very strong view on this, where she says, well, when your father was dying, it was a great comfort to both of us that we would meet again in heaven.
Now, if I were to marry again, how would this work?
Surely I would to meet him and the other man in heaven, and we'd have to sort of work out a motive for Vendi in the upper air. And she was almost making joke, but at the same time there was a sort of serious element in this that the Catholicism, it's so much there.
That they don't have to go on about it too much.
But the mother has a very nice time explaining why no one should be married again on the basis the shoot disappointment on arrival in heaven to find that.
Your wife has a new husband.
The idea of heavenly social embarrassment is a very precise one. Oh God, all right, now, all my chickens are coming
home to roost. One of the things that Long Island, it seems to me, is about, is the consequence of the drama of Brooklyn that actually, at the end of Brooklyn you can have a triumphant or a purposeful moment where Alish makes her choice and follows the path through to the next chapter of her life Long Island again and again comes to the kind of detritus that's left behind from that kind of choice, the disappointment, the sense of betrayal, and in her dynamic with her mother in
Long Island, we say that almost most acutely, her mother is one thing with her daughter, another thing with her grandchildren. She is both hoarding the letters from America and at the same time not giving elish any idea that she's read them.
Yeah, you see.
I think this is a fundamental Irish story in that the disruption to life from the eighteen forties onwards was it someone in every family left, and their leaving was massy. They went up for work, they went when they were very young, but they left behind them some idea that something had not occurred that should have occurred, and they brought with them to Australia, or to America or to England.
There's a constant sense of an unfinished life, and some societies have been built on this, such as the United States, such as Australia, and some countries then have been aimed
by it, which is Ireland. And so the novel almost every image for deciding her mother doesn't have the right things in her kitchen and her mother resenting the fact that she's having like a sil charity is coming from America, but the fact that also that maybe all the time she should never have gone, and that what has happened to disrupt their relationship is essentially disastrous and causes nothing but trouble as she attempts to marry an Italian and
move into his world in a country that neither of them is from, so that all of that business is there in the novel. In other words, my effort was to try and get it the size of a postage stamp, you, to bring it down to the intimate, to try and take the epic out of it, to see what I could do, then to use a minimalist form to suggest an epic moment.
On that minimalist mode, I read an interview with you where you talked about the process of stripping back for long Island, getting rid of simile and meta four and everything you could, just to pair it right back, fighting your rightly instincts.
This is partly the pandemic, you know, where I suddenly had a lot of time, which is how the book got started. Then when I delivered it, it wasn't going to be printed for a year, and I wasn't going to be published for eighteen months, so I had ten or eleven months. And what I started to do was just to read it, just just just to take it, print it out and read it. Other than the Jones Beach thing, I don't think I added anything, but I certainly took scenes out.
Once they went out, they fell away. I never missed them.
I'm going to let you go in a second, but I can't let you go without there are two topics I wanted to touch on briefly before we finish up. The first one is James Baldwin and the second one is Costco. Two topics on which you have enthused passionately to my great pleasure in the past twelve months. And tell me about Baldwin and what he means to you as a writer.
First off, you know, trying to find somebody else other than James Joyce who went through religion, who had, you know, problems about being sort of dissident from almost religious upbringing, brought up in a very close community, interested in the melody around prose, you know, trying to find a pro style that matched in some way levels of raised feeling.
And I read Baldwen.
When I mean I read The Rotel on the Mountain when I was eighteen, realizing after that he wrote Giovanni's Room and realized that journey, but then the journey into the essays, the journey to becoming one of the great sort.
I saw the great political thinkers, someone no matter what was going on politically, his line on it made up of these great essays, A thousand page book of great essays and essays that no matter what year they were written in a lot of them were written in the fifties and sixties are absolutely still urgent in a way that very few essays are. Norman Mailer's essays are not surviving.
Well. I think John Didion has survived. I mean that those essays.
Still sing, and I think Baldwins do so he just just generally it.
Was a great figure.
Costco is where they've got a big phone call from the editor in America saying, your book's on sailing Costco and I didn't know what that meant, but it's a big deal because it means that people go to the shop in Costco like they want to take things away, and they buy chickens, and they buy all sorts.
Of masses of toilet paper.
Anyway, this book Long Adam is going to be bought by Costco, which.
Again they buy very few books.
They have tom on a table in the middle of everything else, and people just tend to put one into their basket as they're going by. So it's a very important business. And I got interviewed by a woman who was from the Costco magazine, and I loved that. I just felt I felt that I was moving towards the center of American life, you know, instead of being cozy on the margins with my New Yorker and York Review book.
So we're coming in from doing your reading on Long Island in the library, and the woman from the publishing house, he said to me, why don't we just stop off in Costco. I said, I'm great, I'd love to do that. And I started just to pretend I was employed by Costco to do an ad for their chicken.
And so I held up the chicken and I came up with I.
Think a very good slogan that I think, you know, said this chicken is filled with chickenness. And then I was able to show there was right beside my book, and that my book was here and the chicken was there, and by saying the chicken was good, I was implying that my book was good.
And then we went off again and it ended up on TikTok.
Just how look at this son, Look at this chicken, look at the size of it. A man of chickenness in the chicken.
And honestly this is true.
There was a young, reasonably famous American poet in Dublin and I was at a thing and this poet came up to me. I thought he might say, I've read one of your books, or you know, I read an article you wrote or something about you.
And he said, hold on, are you the Casco guy? Are you the chicken guy? And I said, yeah, yeah, that's that's my claim to fame.
It's I am glad you're able to kind of hold many claimers to fame in the one package. But I will say that your book is full of book noters, book notus from front to back, as it's an absolute tree.
Well, thank you very much, Michael, Thank you very much for saying that.
Well, thank you for joining us today.
Okay, thank you.
Column Toybin's latest novel is Long Island, and you can find it in all good bookstores now and great news for those toy Bin fans in Melbourne and Sydney. Column is coming to town. He's going to be at Melbourne Writers' Festival on Wednesday May twenty first and Sydney Writers' Festival on Friday May twenty third. You can go to both those festival's websites to get information and get yourself some tickets. At Sydney Writers' Festival, he will be in conversation with
me and also previous Read This guest Charlotte Wood. We're going to talk about Australian writing versus Irish writing and I hope to see some of you there.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. We'll have another episode of Read This to share with you next Sunday, and as always, if you want to dive further into Read This, you can search for it wherever you.
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