Speaker 1: I truly love the novels of Column Toybin. I think
Speaker 1: perhaps my favorite, still all these years on, remains his
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two book The heather Blazing. It's the story
Speaker 1: of a retired High Court judge in smalltown Ennescorthy in
Speaker 1: County Wexford, reflecting on his life and his memories. I
Speaker 1: was still a teenager when I read it, devouring grown
Speaker 1: up books that I barely understood. And honestly, there's no
Speaker 1: reason a teenager in Melbourne, Australia should have been so
Speaker 1: blown away by a book that's frankly about old age,
Speaker 1: about an old man shut off from his emotions and
Speaker 1: his family, dealing with the erosion of the order and
Speaker 1: certainties with which he scaffolded his life. Rereading it now,
Speaker 1: I can see two things. Column Toybin is a superb writer,
Speaker 1: and I was probably a pretty weird kid. The heather
Speaker 1: Blazing was only his second book, and in subsequent years
Speaker 1: he built a name as one of the language's finest
Speaker 1: contemporary novelists. He's perhaps best known for his sixth novel,
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine's hugely successful literary sensation Brooklyn, which
Speaker 1: plays to Enna Scorthy front and center. It's the story
Speaker 1: of Eilish Lacey, a young woman who leaves Ireland for
Speaker 1: the promise of a new, less claustrophobic existence in America. There,
Speaker 1: she meets and falls in love with a young plumber
Speaker 1: called Tony Fiarella. When the death of her sister takes
Speaker 1: Eilish back to Ireland, she secretly marries Tony before she leaves,
Speaker 1: but on her return home she finds herself slipping back
Speaker 1: into her old life, a friendship with Nancy, a burgeoning
Speaker 1: romance with Jim Farrell. It's a modern classic. It captivated
Speaker 1: audiences and was adapted into an equally acclaimed film starring
Speaker 1: Sorcia Ronan and Dominal Gleeson. Now Toybin has returned to
Speaker 1: Enna Scorthy and to Ailish Lacy, whereas Brooklyn ends on
Speaker 1: a note of hope for the new world, with Elish
Speaker 1: returning to America and Tony. The opening of Long Island
Speaker 1: picks up the action two decades on, with the Elish
Speaker 1: being accosted by an angry neighbor. His wife is pregnant
Speaker 1: to Tony. I'm Michael Williams and this is read This
Speaker 1: I show about the books we love and the sequels
Speaker 1: that follow them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was having thoughts or I was having something
Speaker 2: about four that the idea of writing a novel, which
Speaker 2: would be plot lad plot lad means that every single
Speaker 2: thing must move as an arrow moves towards some sort
Speaker 2: of point, and that if you're not doing that, it
Speaker 2: would the scene you will attempt to write, For example,
Speaker 2: if you deviate for a second and give people extra
Speaker 2: feelings or extra scenes or moments between two characters, that
Speaker 2: will fall away as you the author reads the book,
Speaker 2: but it's not needed that you're following the what normally
Speaker 2: has been really taken over. I suppose by the detective
Speaker 2: writer that everything really must move, even if ingeniously or
Speaker 2: not directly, but it must move towards a point. And
Speaker 2: so that that was really the aim in Long Island.
Speaker 2: And you see, the word sequel only came up when
Speaker 2: the book was delivered and people were trying to work
Speaker 2: out how we're going to place this book. What's going
Speaker 2: to the jacket was and the word sequel started. And
Speaker 2: I hadn't really put a thought into it, in the
Speaker 2: way that you often don't put it thought into something
Speaker 2: for good reasons, because you're avoiding thinking about it. And
Speaker 2: the problem is that this has been the most successful
Speaker 2: book of man commercially. So here am I jumping on
Speaker 2: the bandwagon and riding it the retired horse to death.
Speaker 2: I suppose. The first thing is that I got a
Speaker 2: lot of energy from the film. And I know that
Speaker 2: a lot of writers have had nightmares of having their
Speaker 2: work completely destroyed by an awful scriptwriter and director. And
Speaker 2: I saw the film a lot in a short space
Speaker 2: of time, and I had to grow up at the
Speaker 2: stage and say something about it. So I would always
Speaker 2: just sit in the centiment and watch it. And those
Speaker 2: things end up having a big effect on you, because
Speaker 2: of course it's your own emotions to start with, taking
Speaker 2: over by someone and then given back to you, and
Speaker 2: that's a very powerful business.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, one of the
Speaker 1: things that struck me about the film as an adaptation
Speaker 1: is the end hits a couple of different beats or
Speaker 1: a couple of different notes to the ones that you
Speaker 1: did yourself in the novel, and mainly about Alisha and
Speaker 1: her decisions, mainly about how active and how clear she
Speaker 1: is on the decision to go with Tony and be
Speaker 1: back in Brooklyn, and gives that kind of gives that
Speaker 1: much more solid idea about this is where I belong to.
Speaker 1: This is whereas the novel, as I remember it, is
Speaker 1: far more elliptical about how she's feeling about all of it.
Speaker 2: Oh, and it is kind of ambivuous. She doesn't really
Speaker 2: know what to do. She drifts and she's forced back
Speaker 2: in the novel. I think the film wanted to give
Speaker 2: her more agency, as they call it, than I wanted
Speaker 2: to give her. But I'm a sucker for that very
Speaker 2: last scene, which I didn't write. Nick Hornby wrote it,
Speaker 2: where she's across the road and Tony comes out of
Speaker 2: it a shop.
Speaker 3: They've been doing some work with his brother.
Speaker 2: His brother sees her first, and then they see each other,
Speaker 2: and I just cheer up, because, you know, because I
Speaker 2: couldn't write that.
Speaker 1: That question of Eilish's agency is kind of central to
Speaker 1: the ways in which she has changed and grown as
Speaker 1: a character in the intervening decades between the two books.
Speaker 1: Some of the readings of her as a protagonist in
Speaker 1: Brooklyn would have it that she was passive. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's quite right, but she was certainly circumspect, and
Speaker 1: as we find her in Long Island, she has more grit.
Speaker 1: She is sharper. She is far more directive in her life.
Speaker 1: Was that a deliberate decision in terms of how you
Speaker 1: were going to characterize her twenty years on?
Speaker 3: Yeah? That in another word, she can't be dreamy.
Speaker 2: In the previous book, she drifted along, she went with things,
Speaker 2: she went with the flow, and people liked her and
Speaker 2: looked after her. But she didn't come to America to
Speaker 2: take New York. But now she's built a castle in
Speaker 2: the sense she's made a family. She's had two children,
Speaker 2: and even though you know there are a problem with
Speaker 2: the in laws, they're not great problems. She's got a
Speaker 2: wonderful relationship with her children. And just before the opening
Speaker 2: of the book, he realized that, well, she has just
Speaker 2: built her world.
Speaker 1: There's this wonderful early scene where, having been too forthright
Speaker 1: at one of her in law's big family lunches, kind
Speaker 1: of horrifyingly, there is an outsider watching people talk all
Speaker 1: over each other, watching these rituals to which she barely belongs.
Speaker 1: She's too forthright, and then by mutual agreement no longer
Speaker 1: attends them. And there's a wonderful scene that comes out
Speaker 1: of that where she gets the Sunday New York Times
Speaker 1: for herself, and that opens up this entirely different existence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a funny thing happened in suburbs and in
Speaker 2: provincial places in the late sixties early seventies is that
Speaker 2: women who were not involved actively and openly with feminism,
Speaker 2: feminism swept in under their doors in some way.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It came in the letter box, it came to the television,
Speaker 2: of course, the radio, but it happened at home.
Speaker 3: It happened in our house.
Speaker 2: Where my mother moved from a newspaper called The arsh Press,
Speaker 2: which really wasn't very good to the Irish Times, which
Speaker 2: was considered sort of Protestant liberal newspaper in Ireland and
Speaker 2: had really good coverage of the arts and really very
Speaker 2: well written articles, and it was obviously it was the
Speaker 2: intellectual paper. And my mother started to first of all
Speaker 2: swap it with the neighbor, but then she decided to
Speaker 2: get it herself. It was a very big move and
Speaker 2: I think it changed things in the house. And it's
Speaker 2: almost done a matter now because of course people can
Speaker 2: just go online and find everything. But those things were
Speaker 2: very big changes that occurred families in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in what you're saying about the castle that
Speaker 1: Alish has created in the family. One of the things
Speaker 1: that's so touching in those early scenes, even though we
Speaker 1: see them filtered through the animating disaster that sets the
Speaker 1: plot into sequence, is that not just English, but Tony's
Speaker 1: also a really good parent, Like the two of them
Speaker 1: have what seems to be very lovely relationships with their
Speaker 1: very nice children. All of that is delivered in a
Speaker 1: way that is devoid of kind of false drama or
Speaker 1: friction or tension.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you see, it was Tony's already been demonized at
Speaker 2: the opening of the books. You'd be very careful not
Speaker 2: to go on with that, not to kick him when
Speaker 2: he's down, as it were. So therefore, he particularly has
Speaker 2: a relationship with his daughter, and he's had since she
Speaker 2: was a baby. And he's one of those fathers you know,
Speaker 2: who just can't stop looking at their chat their daughter.
Speaker 2: So you know, that's very important that that that bond
Speaker 2: is there.
Speaker 3: You know, what happens that the openly the novel is a.
Speaker 2: Big blow simply because we're talking about simple happiness, but
Speaker 2: a simple happiness that eighties has created very very carefully,
Speaker 2: and so, yeah, I was interested in all that.
Speaker 1: How important is it that the bearer of the news
Speaker 1: about Tony's infidelity is an Irishman rather than an American
Speaker 1: or an Italian? Or how much does it matter that
Speaker 1: it's a shouting Irishman who sets the thing off?
Speaker 2: It matters enormously because I can't write American dialogue.
Speaker 3: And there we are.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean?
Speaker 3: In other words, how what would an American's anger be? Like?
Speaker 2: What words would he use? And also what's his own background?
Speaker 2: Because it would matter enormously. Is he, for example, is
Speaker 2: he from the Midwest? Is he local?
Speaker 3: Is he? What is he?
Speaker 2: I would have no idea. I would get one word wrong,
Speaker 2: and in getting one word wrong, I would get the
Speaker 2: sort of grammar of the moment wrong. The important thing
Speaker 2: she has to be able to judge is he saying
Speaker 2: something he means? Is he saying something true? Is he threatening?
Speaker 2: Are his threats empty? She has to be able to
Speaker 2: read that. Now, how do you read that if you're
Speaker 2: in such a foreign country.
Speaker 3: It's very hard to interpret all that.
Speaker 1: That question of foreignness and of speaking a different language
Speaker 1: runs right through this book, as it did with Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: You know you've named both of these novels after the
Speaker 1: talismanic place where she makes a new home in America.
Speaker 1: But actually, weirdly, Brooklyn is quite absent from Brooklyn, and
Speaker 1: Long Island is largely absent from Long Island. Why did
Speaker 1: you send her those places in the naming of the books.
Speaker 2: Yes, she doesn't experience Brooklyn, you know. In other words,
Speaker 2: it's happened. It's happened with so many people. The emigrant
Speaker 2: experience is so much about missing things, not just missing
Speaker 2: home that that's an easy thing to work out. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they miss home, but missing what's actually happening in that
Speaker 2: sort of texture and flavor of the place.
Speaker 3: I think it happens with a young woman more.
Speaker 2: Because she's she's not going to be feel free in
Speaker 2: the streets or the bars or the stadiums in the
Speaker 2: same way. But Long Island was what Tony promised her,
Speaker 2: and it happened for I was in the choir in
Speaker 2: the Catholic church. I think it was an upper west
Speaker 2: Side around eighty sixth Street on the west side, and
Speaker 2: the church was completely Irish Catholic except there were no
Speaker 2: there were no Irish people left.
Speaker 3: I said that the priest to of course was Hispanic.
Speaker 3: And where did all the Irish go.
Speaker 2: So they went out of the island, out of Long Island,
Speaker 2: you know, in the in the Great those funny migrations
Speaker 2: in cities, people might have gone from the Upper West
Speaker 2: Side to Brooklyn, and the next generation wanted a garden,
Speaker 2: and they went they went to the Long Island.
Speaker 1: M It's also significant that she's in a cul deer
Speaker 1: sect that in many ways mirrors the curtain twitching kind
Speaker 1: of existence that she was so keen to escape, the scrutinized.
Speaker 1: Every time you step out the front door, her sisters
Speaker 1: in law standing in the doorway one at a time,
Speaker 1: so they're not making up the numbers that they'll be noticed.
Speaker 1: It's kind of very funny the way all of that
Speaker 1: stuff is observed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, again, it's suited by darker purpose.
Speaker 2: Tony promises her this, they're going to build four houses,
Speaker 2: and that's what they do.
Speaker 3: They build four houses.
Speaker 2: But of course it meets means for me and I
Speaker 2: have to worry too much about, you know, and like
Speaker 2: what day does she visit her mother? And none of
Speaker 2: they're all gathered together, so it just made it much
Speaker 2: easier if they were all living there, so they could
Speaker 2: all encroach on her at various times and not others.
Speaker 2: You see, the problem with the Long Island thing is
Speaker 2: that it's very thin in the sense that she's married,
Speaker 2: she's got two kids. That's her world. She doesn't go
Speaker 2: to Irish bar, isn't involved in lookal politics. It's just
Speaker 2: needven in the library. She goes to work. But again
Speaker 2: you can only get a certain amount out of the
Speaker 2: job or the house. So I needed one more drama.
Speaker 2: And the drama course is the drama of Tony's family,
Speaker 2: is the drama of another enclave.
Speaker 3: Again, it has to come. I feel careful with it.
Speaker 2: Her mother in law has to be very kind and
Speaker 2: decent in a whole lot of different ways, and you
Speaker 2: know there's no one in making her an ogre. But
Speaker 2: the two women do have a particular problem over what issue,
Speaker 2: and Aligh becomes from this nonchalant, drifting, passive circumspect figure.
Speaker 3: She becomes right stubborn on one matter.
Speaker 1: From a craft perspective, one of the things that's so
Speaker 1: astonished me in Long Island is how well you manage
Speaker 1: to create a sense of her purpose and of her
Speaker 1: character while at the same time denying us too much interiority.
Speaker 1: And maybe it's a function of the way in which
Speaker 1: you approach plot in this book, or maybe it's a
Speaker 1: function of the fact that once she does get back
Speaker 1: to Ireland, you move into a kind of polyphonic mode
Speaker 1: where we get different perspectives driving the narrative at different times.
Speaker 1: But was that a very deliberate decision not to have
Speaker 1: us in her head wallowing with the kind of the
Speaker 1: angst and the personal dilemma?
Speaker 2: The problem is that if you do that, you can
Speaker 2: do it once. You can't then do it twice. You
Speaker 2: can't have it again and again and again. You know,
Speaker 2: on Monday she felt this thing towards Tony. She went
Speaker 2: over in her mind what she knew, Well, what did.
Speaker 3: She do on Tuesday?
Speaker 2: And so you can have that to a certain extent,
Speaker 2: but what she does becomes more important than what she thinks.
Speaker 2: But I had to soften that a bit because there's
Speaker 2: a moment where she goes out onto Jones Beach and
Speaker 2: she goes for a walk and suddenly she realizes that
Speaker 2: or the reader realizes that her own life has become
Speaker 2: a sort of set of memories, that it isn't merely
Speaker 2: a new experience after new experience, that the business of
Speaker 2: being on that beach with those kids when they were small,
Speaker 2: with Tony, when they were just married, that all of
Speaker 2: that has become very soft and now suddenly sharp memory
Speaker 2: for her. She suddenly has put down roots in memory
Speaker 2: on Long Island, which he certainly wasn't where she'd done before.
Speaker 2: So I thought that was what I would do, rather
Speaker 2: than have her constantly going into her thoughts for two pages,
Speaker 2: because I felt that those tots are pretty circumscribed in
Speaker 2: the book in the sense that she is recovering from
Speaker 2: what she's heard about Tony. She is remembering various things
Speaker 2: that happened with Tony's family to see piecing together how
Speaker 2: she has ended like this on Long Island before she
Speaker 2: will go just so that when she's back in Ireland,
Speaker 2: you have an extra underplot, which is not merely what
Speaker 2: she sees in Ireland, but that there is a past
Speaker 2: now that will some way pull her back towards American.
Speaker 1: Coming up after the break column shares the American cultural
Speaker 1: forces that have shaped his work, from James Baldwin to Well,
Speaker 1: You're not going to guess the second one. Toybin has
Speaker 1: in other interviews express this fear that sequels are typically
Speaker 1: disappointing to my mind. Long Island escapes that curse very effectively,
Speaker 1: firstly because it stands on its own as a propulsive, charming,
Speaker 1: thoughtful novel, but more importantly for the legions of fans
Speaker 1: of Brooklyn, because it's not a retread. When Ailish returns
Speaker 1: to Ireland, the characters from Brooklyn who she left behind
Speaker 1: have built on their own lives and moved on in
Speaker 1: different ways. More crucially, given that Brooklyn culminated in a
Speaker 1: love triangle of sorts, Jim, the other man who she
Speaker 1: might have ended up with, has pieced together his life
Speaker 1: after being left behind, running a bar and beginning a
Speaker 1: relationship with Ailish's old friend Nancy. And a big part
Speaker 1: of how toy Bin departs from Brooklyn in Long Island
Speaker 1: is his decision to give sections of the novel to
Speaker 1: both Jim and Nancy so that we might hear their
Speaker 1: perspective on events and understand what they have at stake.
Speaker 2: Because she's been away, there's so many things she doesn't know,
Speaker 2: And how do you work with the reader when the
Speaker 2: reader needs to know something that Ali doesn't know. Now
Speaker 2: you can tell the reader as the author, and this
Speaker 2: doesn't work. The reader gets tired of being told things.
Speaker 2: So therefore I realize the best way to try this
Speaker 2: was to try it from three sides. In otherwise you
Speaker 2: would have a big chunk at the beginning from Ali's respective.
Speaker 2: You would move then to part two and you would
Speaker 2: have Oh, someone called Nancy, and the reader, I would hope,
Speaker 2: seems oddly satisfied. Oh, I know Aleish, I know why
Speaker 2: she's home. I know the whole story. Nancy doesn't know
Speaker 2: the whole story. And then you realize, but what you've
Speaker 2: told about Nancy, Alish doesn't know. So his business of
Speaker 2: not knowing becomes I think almost the subject of the book,
Speaker 2: or the effort to make a secret energy in the
Speaker 2: book is who knows what?
Speaker 3: But mainly who doesn't know what? But the reader always knows.
Speaker 1: How important is that? Structurally is a way to approach
Speaker 1: characters who, for one reason or another are repressing both
Speaker 1: their feelings and their their desires.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure there's that much repression
Speaker 2: in the sense that you're dealing with ninety seventy six,
Speaker 2: So you're dealing with the period in Ireland where you
Speaker 2: could still have a long engagement when people got engaged
Speaker 2: before they got married, and so you're dealing with the
Speaker 2: whole business that since Nancy's daughter is engaged, Nancy doesn't
Speaker 2: want to announce her engagement because we're cut across her daughter.
Speaker 2: So then not that depends on that secret, which is
Speaker 2: really done out of good manners. It's done out of
Speaker 2: just not wanting to upset the daughter, rather than being
Speaker 2: done out of any sort of you know, repression. For example,
Speaker 2: the Catholic Church plays almost no part in the book,
Speaker 2: and there's a nice priest. He just helped people get
Speaker 2: married and does those things waves and you know, everyone
Speaker 2: goes to Mass, but there's no big Catholic sort of
Speaker 2: repression in them.
Speaker 1: You're right, maybe repression is too loaded a word, particularly
Speaker 1: in an Irish context, but I guess I mean kind
Speaker 1: of stifled, you know. Jim. Jim is a man who
Speaker 1: has lived his life kind of bettening down the feelings
Speaker 1: because he's kind of in a constant state of mortification.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's also that he owns a bar, because
Speaker 2: if you own a bar and you've got a reputation
Speaker 2: for being a gossip, people wouldn't like that. So you
Speaker 2: behind the bar, you hear everything. You're moving back and forth.
Speaker 2: He's been there all his life. He's father with there
Speaker 2: before him, just watching everything, making sure that everything's okay,
Speaker 2: but saying nothing. What I've got to do with him
Speaker 2: then is to treat him like a character from Jane Austen.
Speaker 3: So he has all that stuff in the bar downstairs.
Speaker 2: But he goes upstairs at night, and he's on his
Speaker 2: own in that big house, and he's got a big
Speaker 2: room to sit, and he can drink, and he amount
Speaker 2: have giny wants, and he's uneasy in his solitude. And
Speaker 2: what he really wants is he's a man who wants
Speaker 2: to get married, who should be sharing.
Speaker 3: His bed with the woman. And therefore it's not a problem.
Speaker 2: When Nancy comes along, even though they've known other other lives,
Speaker 2: but she seems so lively and so ready for life
Speaker 2: and so filled with things, and so there's absolutely no problem.
Speaker 2: They're in their forties, they're going to get married. And
Speaker 2: this is again another sort of moment of perfection. Jim
Speaker 2: is going to have his problems solved by this very
Speaker 2: busy woman who's Nancy. And then you can come in
Speaker 2: under that where the first story begins to impinge on
Speaker 2: the stay.
Speaker 1: When you describe it that way, it makes me see
Speaker 1: you as much more the monster than i'd originally kind
Speaker 1: of conceived you.
Speaker 2: Well, what I'm interested in doing is dramatizing, and for
Speaker 2: dramatization only disruption, And therefore.
Speaker 3: You could use the word monster, but you can also
Speaker 3: use the word novelist.
Speaker 1: They're interchangeable terms. I'm convinced of that. I think in
Speaker 1: many ways this might be your funniest book. Bits of
Speaker 1: it absolutely tickled me in ways that I was just
Speaker 1: delighted by sequences. Particularly, Ailish's mother has a wonderful turn
Speaker 1: of phrase when she's furious at the idea of an
Speaker 1: eightieth birthday party and is gleefully talking about the neighbor
Speaker 1: who drank too much gin and lemonade and died the
Speaker 1: next day.
Speaker 2: Yes, she died of a birthday party one day.
Speaker 3: It was the next day was a hearse.
Speaker 4: But there's a There's a scene towards the end which
Speaker 4: is sort of really important for the book, and I
Speaker 4: was hesitant about it at first, but for it, it's
Speaker 4: the whole idea of someone getting married a second time,
Speaker 4: and Ali's mother has a very strong view on this,
Speaker 4: where she says, well, when your father was dying, it
Speaker 4: was a great comfort to both of us that we
Speaker 4: would meet again in heaven.
Speaker 3: Now, if I were to marry again, how would this work?
Speaker 2: Surely I would meet him and the other man in heaven,
Speaker 2: and we'd have to sort of work out a modus
Speaker 2: for Vendi in the upper in the upper air. And
Speaker 2: she was almost making joke, but at the same time
Speaker 2: there was a sort of serious element in this that
Speaker 2: the Catholicism, it's so much there that they don't have
Speaker 2: to go on about it too much. But the mother
Speaker 2: has a very nice time explaining when no one should
Speaker 2: be married again on the basis the shoot disappointment on
Speaker 2: arrival in heaven to find that your wife has a
Speaker 2: new husband.
Speaker 1: The idea of heavenly social embarrassment is a very precise
Speaker 1: One's Oh God, all right, now, sickens are coming home
Speaker 1: to roost. One of the things that Long Island, it
Speaker 1: seems to me, is about, is the consequences of the
Speaker 1: drama of Brooklyn, that actually, at the end of Brooklyn
Speaker 1: you can have a triumphant or a purposeful moment where
Speaker 1: Alish makes her choice and follows the path through to
Speaker 1: the next chapter of her life. Long Island again and
Speaker 1: again comes to the kind of detritus that's left behind
Speaker 1: from that kind of choice, the disappointment, the sense of betrayal,
Speaker 1: and in her dynamic with her mother in Long Island,
Speaker 1: we see that almost most acutely, her mother is one
Speaker 1: thing with her daughter, another thing with her grandchildren. She
Speaker 1: is both hoarding the letters from America and at the
Speaker 1: same time not giving elish any idea that she's read them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: See, I think this is a fundamental Irish story in
Speaker 2: that the disruption to life from the eighteen forties onwards
Speaker 2: was it's someone in everything. Family left, and their leaving
Speaker 2: was messy. They went up for work, they went when
Speaker 2: they were very young, but they left behind them some
Speaker 2: idea that something had not occurred that should have occurred,
Speaker 2: and they brought with them to Australia, or to America
Speaker 2: or to England. There's a constant sense of an unfinished life,
Speaker 2: and some societies have been built on this, such as
Speaker 2: the United States, such as Australia, and some countries then
Speaker 2: have been aimed by it, which is Ireland and so
Speaker 2: the novel almost every image it for deciding her mother
Speaker 2: doesn't have the right things in her kitchen, and her
Speaker 2: mother resenting the fact that she's having like a sil charity.
Speaker 3: Is coming from America.
Speaker 2: But the fact that also that maybe all the time
Speaker 2: she should never have gone, and that what has happened
Speaker 2: to disrupt their relationship is essentially disastrous and causes nothing
Speaker 2: but trouble as she attempts to marry an Italian and
Speaker 2: move into his world in a country that neither of
Speaker 2: them is from, so that all of that businesses there
Speaker 2: in the novel. In otherwise, my effort was to try
Speaker 2: and get it the size of a postage stamp, to
Speaker 2: bring it down to the intimate, to try and take
Speaker 2: the epic out of it, to see what I could do,
Speaker 2: then to use a minimalist form to suggest an epic moment.
Speaker 1: On that minimalist mode, I read an interview with you
Speaker 1: where you talked about the process of stripping back for
Speaker 1: Long Island, getting rid of simile and meta four and
Speaker 1: everything you could, just to pair it right back, fighting
Speaker 1: your rightly instincts.
Speaker 2: This is partly the pandemic, you know, where I suddenly
Speaker 2: had a lot of time, which is how the book
Speaker 2: got started. Then when I delivered it, it wasn't going
Speaker 2: to be printed for a year, and I wasn't going
Speaker 2: to be published for eighteen months, so I had ten
Speaker 2: or eleven months, and what I started to do was
Speaker 2: just to read it, just just just to take it,
Speaker 2: print it out and read it. Other than the Jones
Speaker 2: Beach thing, I don't think I added anything, but I
Speaker 2: certainly took scenes out.
Speaker 3: Once they went out, they fell away. I never missed them.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna let you go in a second, but I
Speaker 1: can't let you go without There are two topics I
Speaker 1: wanted to touch on briefly before we finish up. The
Speaker 1: first one is James Baldwin and the second one is Costco.
Speaker 1: Two topics on which you have enthused passionately to my
Speaker 1: great pleasure, in the past twelve months. And tell me
Speaker 1: about Baldwin and what he means to you as a writer.
Speaker 2: First off, you know, trying to find somebody else other
Speaker 2: than James Joyce who went through religion, who had, you know,
Speaker 2: problems about being sort of dissident from almost religious upbringing,
Speaker 2: brought up in a very close community, interested in the
Speaker 2: melody around prose, you know, trying to find a pro
Speaker 2: style that matched in some way levels of raised feeling.
Speaker 2: And I read Baldwin when I I mean I read
Speaker 2: the Rotel on the Mountain when I was eighteen, realizing
Speaker 2: after that he wrote Giovanni's Room and realized that that journey,
Speaker 2: but then the journey into the essays, the journey to
Speaker 2: becoming one of the great sort of I thought of
Speaker 2: the great political thinkers.
Speaker 3: No matter what was going on politically, his.
Speaker 2: Line on it made up of these great essays, a
Speaker 2: thousand page book of great essays and essays that no
Speaker 2: matter what year they were written in a lot of
Speaker 2: them were written in the fifties and sixties, are absolutely
Speaker 2: still urgent in a way that very few essays are.
Speaker 3: Norman Mailer's essays are not surviving. Well.
Speaker 2: I think John Didion has survived. I mean that those
Speaker 2: essays still sing, and I think Baldwin's do so he
Speaker 2: just just generally it was.
Speaker 3: A great figure. Costco is where.
Speaker 2: They've got a big phone call from the editor in
Speaker 2: America saying, your book's on sailing Costco And I didn't
Speaker 2: know what that meant, but it's a big deal because
Speaker 2: it means that people go to the shop in Costco
Speaker 2: like they want to take things away, and they buy chickens,
Speaker 2: and they buy all sorts of masses of toilet paper, Anyway,
Speaker 2: this book Long Adam is going to be I bought
Speaker 2: by Costco, which again they buy very few books. They
Speaker 2: have to run a table in the middle of everything else,
Speaker 2: and people just tend to put one into their basket
Speaker 2: as start going by. So it's a very important business.
Speaker 2: And I got interviewed by a woman who was from
Speaker 2: the Costco magazine, and I loved that. I just felt
Speaker 2: I felt that I was moving towards the center of
Speaker 2: American life, you know, instead of being cozy on the
Speaker 2: margins with my New Yorker.
Speaker 3: And New York Review book.
Speaker 2: So we're coming in from doing a reading on Long
Speaker 2: Island in the library, and the woman from the publishing house,
Speaker 2: he said to me, why don't we just stop off
Speaker 2: in Costco. I said, I'm great, I'd love to do that.
Speaker 2: But I started just to pretend I was employed by
Speaker 2: Costco to do an ad for their chicken. And so
Speaker 2: I held up the chicken and I came up with
Speaker 2: I think a very good slogan that I think, you know,
Speaker 2: said this chicken is filled with chickenness. And then I
Speaker 2: was able to show there was right beside my book,
Speaker 2: and that my book was here, and the chicken was there,
Speaker 2: and by saying the chicken was good, I was implying
Speaker 2: that my book was good.
Speaker 3: And then we went off again and it ended up
Speaker 3: on TikTok.
Speaker 2: Just a look at it, at this chicken, at the
Speaker 2: size of it.
Speaker 3: You are man of chickenness in the chicken.
Speaker 2: And honestly this is true. There was a young, reasonably
Speaker 2: famous American poet in Dublin and I was at a
Speaker 2: thing and this poet came up to me. I thought
Speaker 2: he might say, I've read one of your books, or
Speaker 2: you know, I read an article you wrote or something
Speaker 2: about you.
Speaker 3: And he said, hold on, are you the Costco guy?
Speaker 3: Are you the chicken guy?
Speaker 2: And I said, yeah, yeah, that's that's my claim to fame.
Speaker 1: It's I am glad you're able to kind of hold
Speaker 1: many claimers to fame in the one package. But I
Speaker 1: will say that your book is full of book noters,
Speaker 1: book notus from front to back, as it's an absolute tree.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you very much, Michael, Thank you very much
Speaker 2: for saying that.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3: Okay, thank you.
Speaker 1: Colin toy Bin's latest novel is Long Island, and you
Speaker 1: can find it in all good bookstores now and news
Speaker 1: for those toy Bin fans in Melbourne and Sydney, column
Speaker 1: is coming to town. He's going to be at Melbourne Writers'
Speaker 1: Festival on Wednesday May twenty first and Sydney Writers' Festival
Speaker 1: on Friday May twenty third. You can go to both
Speaker 1: those festival's websites to get information and get yourself some tickets.
Speaker 1: At Sydney Writers' Festival, he will be in conversation with
Speaker 1: me and also previous read this guest, Charlotte Wood. We're
Speaker 1: going to talk about Australian writing versus Irish writing and
Speaker 1: I hope to see some of.
Speaker 3: You there.
Speaker 1: Before we get out of here. Instead of sharing what
Speaker 1: I've been reading this week, I wanted to let you
Speaker 1: know some other excellent entry points to Calmn Toybin's work.
Speaker 1: He received his second book, a prize shortlisting and endless
Speaker 1: acclaim for his magisterial novelization of Henry James's life in
Speaker 1: The Master. It's a fabulous reader and one of the
Speaker 1: best fictionalized account for writer's life I've ever read. And
Speaker 1: if you prefer him Anna Scorthy Mode, don't go past
Speaker 1: the wonderful Nora Webster. Mothers always play a crucial role
Speaker 1: in toy Binn's work, and Norah Webster is in part
Speaker 1: based on his own mother's life. It's wonderful. Lastly, his
Speaker 1: book on James Baldwin is terrific too. He's yet to
Speaker 1: write a book about Costco Chicken, to the best of
Speaker 1: my knowledge. You can find all these books and any
Speaker 1: other we mentioned in the episode at your favorite independent bookstore.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
Speaker 1: please tell your friends and rate and review us. It
Speaker 1: helps a lot. Read This as a Schwartz Media production,
Speaker 1: made possible by the generous support of ar Group. The
Speaker 1: show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing
Speaker 1: by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcho. Big
Speaker 1: thank you this week to Shane Anderson, who edited the episode,
Speaker 1: and Sarah McPhee. Thanks for listening. See you next week.