Deviation Posting – 1950s Brooklyn

Another of my occasional ‘deviation postings’ that usually tend be about novels with a historical setting…like this one. Colm Toibin’s new novel Brooklyn is a rather nice evocation of that borough in the 1950s largely seen through the eyes of a young Irish immigrant woman come from a small town to work in a Brooklyn department store. Toibin deals nicely with the difference in conventions between small south west Irish towns and New York in the 1950s and pretty much everyone comes out of it well – Toibin shows the gradual racial integration of post-war America in a untypically positive light while people generally got on, unwarranted snobbishness abounds on both sides of the Atlantic and even the Catholic Church comes out looking progressive.

This is the genius of Toibin – of course mostly people do just rub along and are polite to each other and most of the time institutions like employers and the Church are fairly benign but it rarely makes for a good story – Toibin takes this normalness and crafts an engrossing tale of one woman’s transference from old Europe to new America and makes it gripping.