BROOKLYN - Colm Toibin

Katherine and I have had this running argument for almost as long as we've known each other about gender bias in literature. Her point has always been that far too many of the novels we asked our students to read were written from a male point of view by mostly male artists. I always argued that gender was not an important factor in literature that was truly great. Sure, Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn are about boys, but that doesn't take away from the universality of those works. Holden's and Huck's realizations spring from situations associated with boys, but they are the same realizations that girls have and the same satisfaction can be had by reading about them, regardless of the sex of the reader. Madame Bovary, I suppose, is in my top five list of favorite novels precisely because Emma's story transcends gender even as it is based on it.

Don't get me wrong. I certainly agree that there are more books about male characters than female ones on required reading lists and I think educators should use a little affirmative action in order to offer students a better balance, but I don't think the current situation is some kind of male conspiracy. The Bean Trees is a great book, but I think teachers make an egregious error when they emphasize feminism in their approach to it. It isn't a feminist statement; it is an exploration of parental love, marital love, and the fight against injustice that love should always engender. Even a book like Catch-22 that on the surface seems to treat women like objects, ends up celebrating the refuge and love provided by those same women. It is a great novel and as a great novel transcends gender.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin is such a book and I strongly suggest that you postpone all further activities and rush out and read it. Just like Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man offers, to my way of thinking (understand that this is the Jesuitical training in me speaking), a pitch perfect description of young introspective males, so does Brooklyn offer such a portrait of a young woman in the person of Eilis Lacey, an Irish lass who makes the journey to Brooklyn.

Overshadowed by her sister, Eilis is destined to be nothing more than a wallflower who dabbles in bookkeeping until, at her sister's instigation, she escapes the social restraints of the home land for the scary freedom of the boroughs of New York City. Terribly homesick at first, she ends up standing up for herself, taking night school classes and falling in love with a life-loving Italian plumber, Tony.

I know, I know, this sounds like the makings of a Harlequin romance and maybe it is, but Toibin's exquisite exploration into the character of an ordinary human being placed in a new set of circumstances just overwhelms the reader with recognition. I was brimming over the entire time even when I reached the last twenty pages and had to force myself to keep going to the inevitable conclusion.

But the conclusion wasn't as inevitable as I thought. It was instead almost exactly what you would expect to happen, but in that expectation we see how ordinary people doing ordinary things can approach tragic heights.

I've always liked those novels that eschewed the grandiose for the commonplace. Most stories, after all, are not about great individuals clashing with great forces; instead, they are about people like me who sometimes find themselves in over their heads frequently due to their own stupid, human choices. Emma Bovary is like that. The sad little car salesman in Fargo is like that. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale are certainly like that.

Brooklyn shows us that choices, even insignificant ones made by seemingly insignificant people, can be just as heroic, just as existential, as those made by anyone no matter how great or heroic they seem.

I am now going to go right out and buy Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I've never read it, but I'm betting it will feel a lot like Toibin's wondrous achievement.