Colm Tóibín spotlights Lindenhurst in the '70s in his novel 'Long Island'

Colm Tóibín begins “Long Island” (Scribner, $28), his sequel to 2009’s “Brooklyn” with a cruel shock. Eilis and Tony, the protagonists, are in marital peril. The time is 1976, 20 years after the events of “Brooklyn.” By the time the novel begins, Eilis and Tony have been long settled in Lindenhurst and have raised a family.

Tóibín, who will read excerpts from the book at the East Meadow Public Library on May 18, spoke with Newsday about Long Island culture in the 1950s and '70s, the importance of community and cultural legacy, and revisiting his characters and their trans-Atlantic sagas.

Please tell us about the attraction to Long Island for immigrant families in the 1950s.

When Eilish first meets Tony’s family they are living in 1½ rooms [in the city]. And she is a bit shocked by that. But Tony’s mother wanted a garden. I think that everyone who has ever been brought up in an inner city has always dreamed that they could have proper bathrooms, proper kitchens and that they can have a garden. The sites were reasonably free, reasonably available. If you were Irish, that was one of the moves you could make. There was a church on the Upper West Side, and if you asked anyone, "Where did the Irish go?," from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, they would say, "Why are you asking? Everyone went to Long Island!"

Community plays a large role in the novel. How are Tony and Eilis shaped by their communities?

Eilis, in Long Island, is surrounded by Tony’s family and they are watching her in a very different way than she would be watched in Enniscorthy. She has tried to keep herself independent from them, but it is hard because her mother-in-law is nosy. She doesn’t really deal with her sisters-in-law because they’re Italian American and she doesn’t know what to do about them and they’re also interested in fashion, which is not her thing. She becomes very interested in her gay brother-in-law, which I think is a very common idea. He comes from the city and reads The New York Times. It’s a hard thing to imagine in 1976 and this is very important to her. So, one part of the family gives her intellectual nourishment, but the other part just watches her.

In what ways does “Long Island” say something different from “Brooklyn” about the liminal space between being an immigrant and becoming a citizen?

It seems to be that that is really a story in the background. It’s just there for a second. Tony’s father, this is Eilish’s father-in-law, his parents came to America from Italy when he was very young. His mother got turned away because she had some eye problem and the Americans thought that she was infectious, and she would never come again. Every year she would go and get her photo taken and send that. The idea that that wave of immigration from Italy brought its own problems, and he tells that story every Sunday to his sons. It’s one of the elements of the famous melting pot. Eilish, it seems that she doesn’t think about home very much, but the minute it comes, it comes very powerfully. Neither Tony’s family nor Eilish have settled in America as Americans.

What was it like to revisit these characters from “Brooklyn” 15 years later?

I promised not to do it. If you look at the great 19th century novels, like Jane Austen, say, she didn’t write a sequel to “Pride and Prejudice,” she wrote another novel. It was the same for all of them right through. I mean, there’s never been a sequel to “Moby Dick!” I wasn’t eager and then the first image, the first three pages, came to me really fast, and then once you have those you have to ask yourself, what is going to happen now? Once that came to me, I thought, I have to do this.