Author Colm Toibin grew up in Ireland, but the word “Brooklyn” was always in his ears.
When Toibin was young, a neighbor emigrated to the United States.
“But her mother didn’t say, ‘The U.S.’ or ‘New York,’” Toibin recalled. “She kept saying, ‘Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. She went to Brooklyn.’ I didn’t know where Brooklyn was. But the words stayed in my mind.”
More than the words. Toibin’s sixth novel, “Brooklyn” (Scribner’s), uses the borough as its backdrop, plopping young Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey in the middle of 1950s Cobble Hill.
She lands a job at a Fulton Street department store (loosely based on Macy’s, but called Bartocci’s) and attends night classes at Brooklyn College. And though she wins friends and succeeds in business, life in America remains a mystery: without context, she can’t understand such things as the changing race relations in post-World War II America.
“She’s Irish in that sense,” said Toibin, who was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, with “The Master” and “The Blackwater Lightship.” “She just hadn’t been involved. Identity politics — she doesn’t know anything about race in America.”
She also knew nothing of baseball at an equally critical moment in Brooklyn history. Fortunately, her Italian boyfriend, Tony, sets her straight about the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson.
Toibin admitted that, like his heroine, he also lacked first-hand knowledge of Brooklyn in the 1950s, so he soaked up books like Myrna and Harvey Frommer’s “It Happened in Brooklyn,” plus books on baseball.
He also walked the streets of Cobble Hill and down Fulton Street, as well as drew inspiration from St. Boniface Church at 190 Duffield St. — which felt like the kind of place where his character would go to Mass and dances.
With such a Cobble Hill-centric story, it’s no wonder that he’s reading at BookCourt on May 13.
“I think it was well chosen,” said Toibin, who is friends with another Cobble Hill writer, Robert Sullivan. “Brooklyn is sort of where everyone lives. If you’re in Manhattan, you’re in exile from Brooklyn.”
Colm Toibin at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets, (718) 875-3677], May 13 at 7 pm.
