My review of Long Island in Compulsive reader, July 20/24
A review of Long Island by Colm Tóibín July 20, 2024 Reviewed by Ruth Latta Long Island by Colm Tóibín Picador May 2024, Hardcover, 304 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1035029440 “You can’t repeat the past,” says Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel, The Great Gatsby . Jay Gatsby replies, “Why of course you can.” As many readers know, the tragedy of Fitzgerald’s novel is that Gatsby can’t win Daisy Buchanan away from her husband. His success in American does not bring him what he wants most, and he ends up dead in the swimming pool of his mansion on Long Island. In Long Island , Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Eilis Lacey Fiorello, protagonist of his earlier novel, Brooklyn , is supposedly living the American dream with her husband and children in an family cul-de-sac on Long Island. An immigrant to America from Enniscorthy, Eire, she has paid one visit home, shortly after her arrival in the United States in 1951. Twenty-one years later, she suddenly decides to return