Long Island (Eilis Lacey No. 2), Colm Tóibín. Scribner (ISBN: 9781476785110) 2024

Summary: Eilis Lacey returns to her home in Ireland when she learns the wife of a customer of her husband is carrying his child.

Eilis Lacey Fiorello answers the door and there is the Irishman who has called several times. In short order, she learns that the man’s wife, who had hired Tony to do plumbing work, is pregnant with Tony’s child. Not only that, he tells her that he will not allow the child in his house but will leave it at the Fiorello’s house. It is their problem. In this sequel to Brooklyn, this bombshell drops in the opening pages and everything else unfolds from there.

Eilis confronts Tony and learns it is all true. Then she makes clear her own decision about the matter. She will not raise the child. She will not deal with this. Nor will she accept Tony’s mother Francesca raising the child. Tony, two of his brothers, and his parents live in an enclave on Long Island. She would still see the child everyday. And as she interacts with Francesca, she is reminded of how much she has always felt the outsider in this close-knit Italian family.

As it happens, Eilis mother’s eightieth birthday is that summer. As a way of underscoring that she will have nothing to do with the child, she plans a visit home to Enniscorthy to coincide with the baby’s birth. She leaves a month early, but arranges for Larry and Rosella, the teenage grandchildren her mother has never seen except in pictures, to arrive in time for the birthday.

But there is more to it than getting away from a painful situation and reconnecting with an aging mother (who knows more than she lets on). There is Jim Farrell. Jim owns a bar in Enniscorthy, above which he lives. After Eilis met and married Tony, she returned for a visit, before her children were born. While there, she met Jim and they had an affair. But her marriage was kept secret, and she suddenly left. And Jim never married, heartbroken with her departure.

Now Jim has been seeing Nancy, who owns a nearby chip shop, and she’s stayed overnight. Recently, they have agreed to get engaged. With the encouragement of their priest, they are planning a Rome wedding the following spring. But they’ve kept the engagement secret, ostensibly to not upstage the wedding of Nancy’s daughter by her first husband, now deceased. While Eilis still lived in Enniscorthy, she and Nancy were best friends.

As you can guess, the old flames re-connect and flame up once more. Eilis doesn’t know about Nancy and Jim doesn’t reveal the secret engagement. Secrets run through this story. Eilis’s secret affair with Jim after she and Tony had married. Tony’s secret liaisons. Nancy and Jim’s secret engagement. A rekindled secret affair. Secrets, as often the case, are not a good thing.

There is also the tension of keeping faith with oneself and with others, especially when commitments conflict and become acts of betrayal. Tony, Eilis, and Jim are all caught up in that tension. Can such entanglements end well? I will leave it to the reader to decide, and to assess how Tóibín has developed his characters and the choices they make.