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