"Long Island," by Colm Toibin

I am an ardent fan of Colm Toibin's fiction, and have read his novels with great admiration and pleasure, and not a little awe. I have also heard him speak, and he has an amazing, powerful yet warm voice and presence. So I was thrilled when his most recent novel, "Long Island" (Scribner, 2024) came out. This is a sequel to one of Toibin's best known and best loved novels, "Brooklyn" (2009). In "Brooklyn," a young woman -- Eilis -- emigrates from Ireland to the United States in the 1950s, then briefly returns to Ireland, during which time she has to choose between two men, Tony in the U.S. and Jim in Ireland. In "Long Island," we find that Eilis and her husband and children now, twenty years later, live in Long Island, and their lives have recently been roiled by an unexpected betrayal. Eilis, angry and confused, then returns to Ireland to visit her mother and to figure out how she feels and what she should do next. When she sees Jim again, the old conflict in her mind between her husband and her former Irish love gradually returns. The twists and turns of the plot are certainly part of the attraction of this novel, as they were with "Brooklyn." But the reader is even more caught up in the portrayals of the characters. Toibin is so psychologically astute, and writes so well about the nuances of the characters' feelings and behavior, that we feel we are inside the characters' minds and hearts, and yet we wonder about the inscrutable mysteries of those same minds and hearts. His writing is perceptive, insightful, and gorgeous. I will admit -- and this is hard for me to say -- that at times while reading "Long Island" I felt it was just a tiny bit repetitive of "Brooklyn." But of course all sequels need to have some overlap. And nothing could keep me from reading and deeply admiring every novel that Toibin writes. I highly recommend this novel. I suggest reading "Brooklyn" first, if you have not yet read it, but even if you have not and do not, "Long Island" is freestanding, and provides plenty of context about the earlier novel, so you can thoroughly savor and enjoy it even without having read "Brooklyn." (For more on Toibin and his novels, see my posts of 1/28/10, 12/4/12, 1/20/13, 11/9/14, 11/16/14, and 12/6/14).

"Real Americans," by Rachel Khong

Rachel Khong is an author I have heard about for a while, and her new novel -- "Real Americans" (Knopf, 2024) -- got good reviews, but I wasn't sure if I would like it or not. I requested it from the local library, still not sure if I would actually read it. (Side note: Thank goodness for libraries, and for the luxury of checking out a book one has heard about, taking it home, holding the book in one's hands, reading the flap descriptions, and leafing through it, all in service of deciding whether to actually read it. If the answer is no, then no harm done. If the answer is yes, and it turns out to be wonderful, hurray!) This longish (400-page) book is crammed with storylines, alternating timelines, swoops among countries, racial identity issues, complex family dynamics, some medical science, a little light science fiction, love affairs, alienation, many emotions, whiplash changes in the characters' lives, secrets, mysteries, and the answers -- eventually -- to those mysteries. The main characters are Lily, who is Chinese American, and her son Nico/Nick, but there are many other characters, including four generations of Lily's family, both in China and the United States. I hesitate to say much about the plot, first because it is somewhat tangled, and second, because I don't want to give away any plot points that the reader should discover on her/his own, and at the right time. So this is a long way of saying that although right up to when I started the book, I hesitated (partly because of the science-fictionish parts that had been mentioned in one review, and readers of this blog may remember that I am generally not very interested in science fiction, except for a few of the classics) to go forward with it, but I was soon drawn in, and then couldn't stop reading. So yes, I recommend this complicated, compelling novel.

"Ana Turns" and two other books by Lisa Gornick

I very recently "discovered" the novels of Lisa Gornick. How glorious it always is to find a new (to me) author! I stumbled across "Ana Turns" (Keylight, 2023) in the new books section of my wonderful local library. The main character, Ana, has been called (by writer Helen Simonson), aptly, "a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway," and is clearly intended by Gornick as such. In this novel, as in Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" (one of my very favorite and most admired novels), we read the story of the day of a woman, with many flashbacks to, and thoughts on, the complicated events and relationships she has experienced. Both novels lead up to a dinner party. Along the way in "Ana Turns," as 60-year-old Ana moves about in current-day New York, we learn of her complex family history, her lovers, her friends. Gornick expertly interweaves these various actors and actions, vividly painting one woman's life, a life that will resonate with the lives of many contemporary women. I was so enchanted with "Ana Turns" that I then found and read two of Gornick's earlier books. "Louisa Meets Bear" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), is a novel that is formed by a set of interlinked stories in which it is not at first clear what the connections are among the stories, but gradually (almost) all is revealed. The third Gornick book I read was "The Peacock Feast" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). As with the other two books, this novel is not at all linear, but roams back and forth in time over a century, focusing on a now almost-100-year-old woman, Prudence, and her family history, mostly in New York City and environs, but with visits to Europe and elsewhere. Also as with the other narratives, the family history holds both great love and great troubles. Readers must be patient as the various plot lines are untangled, but this is not onerous and is part of the pleasure of the books. What a brilliant writer Gornick is, drawing us into her stories, making us wonder and speculate and, in at least one instance for this reader, weep. I highly recommend all three books. (Oh, and yes, the author is, as I wondered about and then found out with a little online research, the niece of feminist essayist/memoirist/literary critic Vivian Gornick, a writer whose work I have long admired and treasured; see my posts of 10/15/15 and 3/28/20.)