March 26, 2025 • 31 mins
Colm Tóibín is regarded as one of Ireland’s greatest authors — and for good reason. With a career spanning 30 years and 11 award-winning novels under his belt, Colm is beloved both at home and abroad. In his latest book, Long Island, Tóibín returns to familiar territory with a sequel to 2009’s best-selling Brooklyn. This week, he and Michael discuss what it means to write a sequel, the importance of James Baldwin’s writing, and, of course, Costco.
Reading list:
The Heather Blazing, Colm Tóibín, 1992
The Master, Colm Tóibín, 2004
Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín, 2009
Nora Webster, Colm Tóibín, 2014
Long Island, Colm Tóibín, 2024
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: Colm Tóibín
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I truly love the novels of Column Toybin. I think
perhaps my favorite, still all these years on, remains his
nineteen ninety two book The heather Blazing. It's the story
of a retired High Court judge in smalltown Ennescorthy in
County Wexford, reflecting on his life and his memories. I
(00:21):
was still a teenager when I read it, devouring grown
up books that I barely understood. And honestly, there's no
reason a teenager in Melbourne, Australia should have been so
blown away by a book that's frankly about old age,
about an old man shut off from his emotions and
his family, dealing with the erosion of the order and
certainties with which he scaffolded his life. Rereading it now,
(00:45):
I can see two things. Column Toybin is a superb writer,
and I was probably a pretty weird kid. The heather
Blazing was only his second book, and in subsequent years
he built a name as one of the language's finest
contemporary novelists. He's perhaps best known for his sixth novel,
(01:06):
two thousand and nine's hugely successful literary sensation Brooklyn, which
plays to Enna Scorthy front and center. It's the story
of Eilish Lacey, a young woman who leaves Ireland for
the promise of a new, less claustrophobic existence in America. There,
she meets and falls in love with a young plumber
called Tony Fiarella. When the death of her sister takes
(01:28):
Eilish back to Ireland, she secretly marries Tony before she leaves,
but on her return home she finds herself slipping back
into her old life, a friendship with Nancy, a burgeoning
romance with Jim Farrell. It's a modern classic. It captivated
audiences and was adapted into an equally acclaimed film starring
Sorcia Ronan and Dominal Gleeson. Now Toybin has returned to
(01:54):
Enna Scorthy and to Ailish Lacy, whereas Brooklyn ends on
a note of hope for the new world, with Elish
returning to America and Tony. The opening of Long Island
picks up the action two decades on, with the Elish
being accosted by an angry neighbor. His wife is pregnant
to Tony. I'm Michael Williams and this is read This
(02:18):
I show about the books we love and the sequels
that follow them.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, I was having thoughts or I was having something
about four that the idea of writing a novel, which
would be plot lad plot lad means that every single
thing must move as an arrow moves towards some sort
of point, and that if you're not doing that, it
would the scene you will attempt to write, For example,
(02:52):
if you deviate for a second and give people extra
feelings or extra scenes or moments between two characters, that
will fall away as you the author reads the book,
but it's not needed that you're following the what normally
has been really taken over. I suppose by the detective
writer that everything really must move, even if ingeniously or
(03:16):
not directly, but it must move towards a point. And
so that that was really the aim in Long Island.
And you see, the word sequel only came up when
the book was delivered and people were trying to work
out how we're going to place this book. What's going
to the jacket was and the word sequel started. And
I hadn't really put a thought into it, in the
(03:37):
way that you often don't put it thought into something
for good reasons, because you're avoiding thinking about it. And
the problem is that this has been the most successful
book of man commercially. So here am I jumping on
the bandwagon and riding it the retired horse to death.
I suppose. The first thing is that I got a
lot of energy from the film. And I know that
(03:58):
a lot of writers have had nightmares of having their
work completely destroyed by an awful scriptwriter and director. And
I saw the film a lot in a short space
of time, and I had to grow up at the
stage and say something about it. So I would always
just sit in the centiment and watch it. And those
things end up having a big effect on you, because
of course it's your own emotions to start with, taking
(04:22):
over by someone and then given back to you, and
that's a very powerful business.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, one of the
things that struck me about the film as an adaptation
is the end hits a couple of different beats or
a couple of different notes to the ones that you
did yourself in the novel, and mainly about Alisha and
her decisions, mainly about how active and how clear she
(04:48):
is on the decision to go with Tony and be
back in Brooklyn, and gives that kind of gives that
much more solid idea about this is where I belong to.
This is whereas the novel, as I remember it, is
far more elliptical about how she's feeling about all of it.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Oh, and it is kind of ambivuous. She doesn't really
know what to do. She drifts and she's forced back
in the novel. I think the film wanted to give
her more agency, as they call it, than I wanted
to give her. But I'm a sucker for that very
last scene, which I didn't write. Nick Hornby wrote it,
where she's across the road and Tony comes out of
it a shop.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
They've been doing some work with his brother.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
His brother sees her first, and then they see each other,
and I just cheer up, because, you know, because I
couldn't write that.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
That question of Eilish's agency is kind of central to
the ways in which she has changed and grown as
a character in the intervening decades between the two books.
Some of the readings of her as a protagonist in
Brooklyn would have it that she was passive. I don't
think that's quite right, but she was certainly circumspect, and
(05:54):
as we find her in Long Island, she has more grit.
She is sharper. She is far more directive in her life.
Was that a deliberate decision in terms of how you
were going to characterize her twenty years on?
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Yeah? That in another word, she can't be dreamy.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
In the previous book, she drifted along, she went with things,
she went with the flow, and people liked her and
looked after her. But she didn't come to America to
take New York. But now she's built a castle in
the sense she's made a family. She's had two children,
and even though you know there are a problem with
the in laws, they're not great problems. She's got a
wonderful relationship with her children. And just before the opening
(06:35):
of the book, he realized that, well, she has just
built her world.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
There's this wonderful early scene where, having been too forthright
at one of her in law's big family lunches, kind
of horrifyingly, there is an outsider watching people talk all
over each other, watching these rituals to which she barely belongs.
She's too forthright, and then by mutual agreement no longer
attends them. And there's a wonderful scene that comes out
(07:01):
of that where she gets the Sunday New York Times
for herself, and that opens up this entirely different existence.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah, there's a funny thing happened in suburbs and in
provincial places in the late sixties early seventies is that
women who were not involved actively and openly with feminism,
feminism swept in under their doors in some way.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
You know.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
It came in the letter box, it came to the television,
of course, the radio, but it happened at home.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
It happened in our house.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Where my mother moved from a newspaper called The arsh Press,
which really wasn't very good to the Irish Times, which
was considered sort of Protestant liberal newspaper in Ireland and
had really good coverage of the arts and really very
well written articles, and it was obviously it was the
intellectual paper. And my mother started to first of all
swap it with the neighbor, but then she decided to
(07:54):
get it herself. It was a very big move and
I think it changed things in the house. And it's
almost done a matter now because of course people can
just go online and find everything. But those things were
very big changes that occurred families in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I'm interested in what you're saying about the castle that
Alish has created in the family. One of the things
that's so touching in those early scenes, even though we
see them filtered through the animating disaster that sets the
plot into sequence, is that not just English, but Tony's
also a really good parent, Like the two of them
(08:30):
have what seems to be very lovely relationships with their
very nice children. All of that is delivered in a
way that is devoid of kind of false drama or
friction or tension.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, you see, it was Tony's already been demonized at
the opening of the books. You'd be very careful not
to go on with that, not to kick him when
he's down, as it were. So therefore, he particularly has
a relationship with his daughter, and he's had since she
was a baby. And he's one of those fathers you know,
who just can't stop looking at their chat their daughter.
So you know, that's very important that that that bond
(09:04):
is there.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
You know, what happens that the openly the novel is a.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Big blow simply because we're talking about simple happiness, but
a simple happiness that eighties has created very very carefully,
and so, yeah, I was interested in all that.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
How important is it that the bearer of the news
about Tony's infidelity is an Irishman rather than an American
or an Italian? Or how much does it matter that
it's a shouting Irishman who sets the thing off?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
It matters enormously because I can't write American dialogue.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
And there we are.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (09:37):
In other words, how what would an American's anger be? Like?
Speaker 2 (09:42):
What words would he use? And also what's his own background?
Because it would matter enormously. Is he, for example, is
he from the Midwest? Is he local?
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Is he? What is he?
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I would have no idea. I would get one word wrong,
and in getting one word wrong, I would get the
sort of grammar of the moment wrong. The important thing
she has to be able to judge is he saying
something he means? Is he saying something true? Is he threatening?
Are his threats empty? She has to be able to
read that. Now, how do you read that if you're
(10:13):
in such a foreign country.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
It's very hard to interpret all that.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
That question of foreignness and of speaking a different language
runs right through this book, as it did with Brooklyn.
You know you've named both of these novels after the
talismanic place where she makes a new home in America.
But actually, weirdly, Brooklyn is quite absent from Brooklyn, and
Long Island is largely absent from Long Island. Why did
(10:40):
you send her those places in the naming of the books.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yes, she doesn't experience Brooklyn, you know. In other words,
it's happened. It's happened with so many people. The emigrant
experience is so much about missing things, not just missing
home that that's an easy thing to work out. Yeah,
they miss home, but missing what's actually happening in that
sort of texture and flavor of the place.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I think it happens with a young woman more.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Because she's she's not going to be feel free in
the streets or the bars or the stadiums in the
same way. But Long Island was what Tony promised her,
and it happened for I was in the choir in
the Catholic church. I think it was an upper west
Side around eighty sixth Street on the west side, and
the church was completely Irish Catholic except there were no
(11:24):
there were no Irish people left.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I said that the priest to of course was Hispanic.
And where did all the Irish go.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So they went out of the island, out of Long Island,
you know, in the in the Great those funny migrations
in cities, people might have gone from the Upper West
Side to Brooklyn, and the next generation wanted a garden,
and they went they went to the Long Island.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
M It's also significant that she's in a cul deer
sect that in many ways mirrors the curtain twitching kind
of existence that she was so keen to escape, the scrutinized.
Every time you step out the front door, her sisters
in law standing in the doorway one at a time,
so they're not making up the numbers that they'll be noticed.
(12:07):
It's kind of very funny the way all of that
stuff is observed.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Yeah, again, it's suited by darker purpose.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Tony promises her this, they're going to build four houses,
and that's what they do.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
They build four houses.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
But of course it meets means for me and I
have to worry too much about, you know, and like
what day does she visit her mother? And none of
they're all gathered together, so it just made it much
easier if they were all living there, so they could
all encroach on her at various times and not others.
You see, the problem with the Long Island thing is
that it's very thin in the sense that she's married,
(12:40):
she's got two kids. That's her world. She doesn't go
to Irish bar, isn't involved in lookal politics. It's just
needven in the library. She goes to work. But again
you can only get a certain amount out of the
job or the house. So I needed one more drama.
And the drama course is the drama of Tony's family,
is the drama of another enclave.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Again, it has to come. I feel careful with it.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Her mother in law has to be very kind and
decent in a whole lot of different ways, and you
know there's no one in making her an ogre. But
the two women do have a particular problem over what issue,
and Aligh becomes from this nonchalant, drifting, passive circumspect figure.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
She becomes right stubborn on one matter.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
From a craft perspective, one of the things that's so
astonished me in Long Island is how well you manage
to create a sense of her purpose and of her
character while at the same time denying us too much interiority.
And maybe it's a function of the way in which
you approach plot in this book, or maybe it's a
(13:47):
function of the fact that once she does get back
to Ireland, you move into a kind of polyphonic mode
where we get different perspectives driving the narrative at different times.
But was that a very deliberate decision not to have
us in her head wallowing with the kind of the
(14:07):
angst and the personal dilemma?
Speaker 2 (14:09):
The problem is that if you do that, you can
do it once. You can't then do it twice. You
can't have it again and again and again. You know,
on Monday she felt this thing towards Tony. She went
over in her mind what she knew, Well, what did.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
She do on Tuesday?
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And so you can have that to a certain extent,
but what she does becomes more important than what she thinks.
But I had to soften that a bit because there's
a moment where she goes out onto Jones Beach and
she goes for a walk and suddenly she realizes that
or the reader realizes that her own life has become
a sort of set of memories, that it isn't merely
a new experience after new experience, that the business of
(14:44):
being on that beach with those kids when they were small,
with Tony, when they were just married, that all of
that has become very soft and now suddenly sharp memory
for her. She suddenly has put down roots in memory
on Long Island, which he certainly wasn't where she'd done before.
So I thought that was what I would do, rather
than have her constantly going into her thoughts for two pages,
(15:09):
because I felt that those tots are pretty circumscribed in
the book in the sense that she is recovering from
what she's heard about Tony. She is remembering various things
that happened with Tony's family to see piecing together how
she has ended like this on Long Island before she
will go just so that when she's back in Ireland,
you have an extra underplot, which is not merely what
(15:29):
she sees in Ireland, but that there is a past
now that will some way pull her back towards American.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Coming up after the break column shares the American cultural
forces that have shaped his work, from James Baldwin to Well,
You're not going to guess the second one. Toybin has
(15:59):
in other interviews express this fear that sequels are typically
disappointing to my mind. Long Island escapes that curse very effectively,
firstly because it stands on its own as a propulsive, charming,
thoughtful novel, but more importantly for the legions of fans
of Brooklyn, because it's not a retread. When Ailish returns
(16:20):
to Ireland, the characters from Brooklyn who she left behind
have built on their own lives and moved on in
different ways. More crucially, given that Brooklyn culminated in a
love triangle of sorts, Jim, the other man who she
might have ended up with, has pieced together his life
after being left behind, running a bar and beginning a
relationship with Ailish's old friend Nancy. And a big part
(16:44):
of how toy Bin departs from Brooklyn in Long Island
is his decision to give sections of the novel to
both Jim and Nancy so that we might hear their
perspective on events and understand what they have at stake.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Because she's been away, there's so many things she doesn't know,
And how do you work with the reader when the
reader needs to know something that Ali doesn't know. Now
you can tell the reader as the author, and this
doesn't work. The reader gets tired of being told things.
So therefore I realize the best way to try this
was to try it from three sides. In otherwise you
would have a big chunk at the beginning from Ali's respective.
(17:21):
You would move then to part two and you would
have Oh, someone called Nancy, and the reader, I would hope,
seems oddly satisfied. Oh, I know Aleish, I know why
she's home. I know the whole story. Nancy doesn't know
the whole story. And then you realize, but what you've
told about Nancy, Alish doesn't know. So his business of
not knowing becomes I think almost the subject of the book,
or the effort to make a secret energy in the
(17:43):
book is who knows what?
Speaker 3 (17:44):
But mainly who doesn't know what? But the reader always knows.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
How important is that? Structurally is a way to approach
characters who, for one reason or another are repressing both
their feelings and their their desires.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure there's that much repression
in the sense that you're dealing with ninety seventy six,
So you're dealing with the period in Ireland where you
could still have a long engagement when people got engaged
before they got married, and so you're dealing with the
whole business that since Nancy's daughter is engaged, Nancy doesn't
want to announce her engagement because we're cut across her daughter.
(18:22):
So then not that depends on that secret, which is
really done out of good manners. It's done out of
just not wanting to upset the daughter, rather than being
done out of any sort of you know, repression. For example,
the Catholic Church plays almost no part in the book,
and there's a nice priest. He just helped people get
married and does those things waves and you know, everyone
goes to Mass, but there's no big Catholic sort of
(18:45):
repression in them.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
You're right, maybe repression is too loaded a word, particularly
in an Irish context, but I guess I mean kind
of stifled, you know. Jim. Jim is a man who
has lived his life kind of bettening down the feelings
because he's kind of in a constant state of mortification.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Yeah, but it's also that he owns a bar, because
if you own a bar and you've got a reputation
for being a gossip, people wouldn't like that. So you
behind the bar, you hear everything. You're moving back and forth.
He's been there all his life. He's father with there
before him, just watching everything, making sure that everything's okay,
but saying nothing. What I've got to do with him
then is to treat him like a character from Jane Austen.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
So he has all that stuff in the bar downstairs.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
But he goes upstairs at night, and he's on his
own in that big house, and he's got a big
room to sit, and he can drink, and he amount
have giny wants, and he's uneasy in his solitude. And
what he really wants is he's a man who wants
to get married, who should be sharing.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
His bed with the woman. And therefore it's not a problem.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
When Nancy comes along, even though they've known other other lives,
but she seems so lively and so ready for life
and so filled with things, and so there's absolutely no problem.
They're in their forties, they're going to get married. And
this is again another sort of moment of perfection. Jim
is going to have his problems solved by this very
busy woman who's Nancy. And then you can come in
(20:07):
under that where the first story begins to impinge on
the stay.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
When you describe it that way, it makes me see
you as much more the monster than i'd originally kind
of conceived you.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Well, what I'm interested in doing is dramatizing, and for
dramatization only disruption, And therefore.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
You could use the word monster, but you can also
use the word novelist.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
They're interchangeable terms. I'm convinced of that. I think in
many ways this might be your funniest book. Bits of
it absolutely tickled me in ways that I was just
delighted by sequences. Particularly, Ailish's mother has a wonderful turn
of phrase when she's furious at the idea of an
(20:48):
eightieth birthday party and is gleefully talking about the neighbor
who drank too much gin and lemonade and died the
next day.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yes, she died of a birthday party one day.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
It was the next day was a hearse.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
But there's a There's a scene towards the end which
is sort of really important for the book, and I
was hesitant about it at first, but for it, it's
the whole idea of someone getting married a second time,
and Ali's mother has a very strong view on this,
where she says, well, when your father was dying, it
was a great comfort to both of us that we
would meet again in heaven.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Now, if I were to marry again, how would this work?
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Surely I would meet him and the other man in heaven,
and we'd have to sort of work out a modus
for Vendi in the upper in the upper air. And
she was almost making joke, but at the same time
there was a sort of serious element in this that
the Catholicism, it's so much there that they don't have
to go on about it too much. But the mother
has a very nice time explaining when no one should
(21:46):
be married again on the basis the shoot disappointment on
arrival in heaven to find that your wife has a
new husband.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
The idea of heavenly social embarrassment is a very precise
One's Oh God, all right, now, sickens are coming home
to roost. One of the things that Long Island, it
seems to me, is about, is the consequences of the
drama of Brooklyn, that actually, at the end of Brooklyn
you can have a triumphant or a purposeful moment where
(22:16):
Alish makes her choice and follows the path through to
the next chapter of her life. Long Island again and
again comes to the kind of detritus that's left behind
from that kind of choice, the disappointment, the sense of betrayal,
and in her dynamic with her mother in Long Island,
we see that almost most acutely, her mother is one
(22:38):
thing with her daughter, another thing with her grandchildren. She
is both hoarding the letters from America and at the
same time not giving elish any idea that she's read them.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
See, I think this is a fundamental Irish story in
that the disruption to life from the eighteen forties onwards
was it's someone in everything. Family left, and their leaving
was messy. They went up for work, they went when
they were very young, but they left behind them some
idea that something had not occurred that should have occurred,
(23:10):
and they brought with them to Australia, or to America
or to England. There's a constant sense of an unfinished life,
and some societies have been built on this, such as
the United States, such as Australia, and some countries then
have been aimed by it, which is Ireland and so
the novel almost every image it for deciding her mother
(23:31):
doesn't have the right things in her kitchen, and her
mother resenting the fact that she's having like a sil charity.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Is coming from America.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
But the fact that also that maybe all the time
she should never have gone, and that what has happened
to disrupt their relationship is essentially disastrous and causes nothing
but trouble as she attempts to marry an Italian and
move into his world in a country that neither of
them is from, so that all of that businesses there
(24:00):
in the novel. In otherwise, my effort was to try
and get it the size of a postage stamp, to
bring it down to the intimate, to try and take
the epic out of it, to see what I could do,
then to use a minimalist form to suggest an epic moment.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
On that minimalist mode, I read an interview with you
where you talked about the process of stripping back for
Long Island, getting rid of simile and meta four and
everything you could, just to pair it right back, fighting
your rightly instincts.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
This is partly the pandemic, you know, where I suddenly
had a lot of time, which is how the book
got started. Then when I delivered it, it wasn't going
to be printed for a year, and I wasn't going
to be published for eighteen months, so I had ten
or eleven months, and what I started to do was
just to read it, just just just to take it,
print it out and read it. Other than the Jones
(24:54):
Beach thing, I don't think I added anything, but I
certainly took scenes out.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Once they went out, they fell away. I never missed them.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
I'm gonna let you go in a second, but I
can't let you go without There are two topics I
wanted to touch on briefly before we finish up. The
first one is James Baldwin and the second one is Costco.
Two topics on which you have enthused passionately to my
great pleasure, in the past twelve months. And tell me
about Baldwin and what he means to you as a writer.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
First off, you know, trying to find somebody else other
than James Joyce who went through religion, who had, you know,
problems about being sort of dissident from almost religious upbringing,
brought up in a very close community, interested in the
melody around prose, you know, trying to find a pro
(25:47):
style that matched in some way levels of raised feeling.
And I read Baldwin when I I mean I read
the Rotel on the Mountain when I was eighteen, realizing
after that he wrote Giovanni's Room and realized that that journey,
but then the journey into the essays, the journey to
becoming one of the great sort of I thought of
the great political thinkers.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
No matter what was going on politically, his.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Line on it made up of these great essays, a
thousand page book of great essays and essays that no
matter what year they were written in a lot of
them were written in the fifties and sixties, are absolutely
still urgent in a way that very few essays are.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Norman Mailer's essays are not surviving. Well.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
I think John Didion has survived. I mean that those
essays still sing, and I think Baldwin's do so he
just just generally it was.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
A great figure. Costco is where.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
They've got a big phone call from the editor in
America saying, your book's on sailing Costco And I didn't
know what that meant, but it's a big deal because
it means that people go to the shop in Costco
like they want to take things away, and they buy chickens,
and they buy all sorts of masses of toilet paper, Anyway,
this book Long Adam is going to be I bought
by Costco, which again they buy very few books. They
(27:02):
have to run a table in the middle of everything else,
and people just tend to put one into their basket
as start going by. So it's a very important business.
And I got interviewed by a woman who was from
the Costco magazine, and I loved that. I just felt
I felt that I was moving towards the center of
American life, you know, instead of being cozy on the
margins with my New Yorker.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
And New York Review book.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
So we're coming in from doing a reading on Long
Island in the library, and the woman from the publishing house,
he said to me, why don't we just stop off
in Costco. I said, I'm great, I'd love to do that.
But I started just to pretend I was employed by
Costco to do an ad for their chicken. And so
I held up the chicken and I came up with
I think a very good slogan that I think, you know,
(27:43):
said this chicken is filled with chickenness. And then I
was able to show there was right beside my book,
and that my book was here, and the chicken was there,
and by saying the chicken was good, I was implying
that my book was good.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
And then we went off again and it ended up
on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Just a look at it, at this chicken, at the
size of it.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
You are man of chickenness in the chicken.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
And honestly this is true. There was a young, reasonably
famous American poet in Dublin and I was at a
thing and this poet came up to me. I thought
he might say, I've read one of your books, or
you know, I read an article you wrote or something
about you.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
And he said, hold on, are you the Costco guy?
Are you the chicken guy?
Speaker 2 (28:23):
And I said, yeah, yeah, that's that's my claim to fame.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
It's I am glad you're able to kind of hold
many claimers to fame in the one package. But I
will say that your book is full of book noters,
book notus from front to back, as it's an absolute tree.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Well, thank you very much, Michael, Thank you very much
for saying that.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Well, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Okay, thank you.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Colin toy Bin's latest novel is Long Island, and you
can find it in all good bookstores now and news
for those toy Bin fans in Melbourne and Sydney, column
is coming to town. He's going to be at Melbourne Writers'
Festival on Wednesday May twenty first and Sydney Writers' Festival
on Friday May twenty third. You can go to both
(29:14):
those festival's websites to get information and get yourself some tickets.
At Sydney Writers' Festival, he will be in conversation with
me and also previous read this guest, Charlotte Wood. We're
going to talk about Australian writing versus Irish writing and
I hope to see some of.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
You there.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Before we get out of here. Instead of sharing what
I've been reading this week, I wanted to let you
know some other excellent entry points to Calmn Toybin's work.
He received his second book, a prize shortlisting and endless
acclaim for his magisterial novelization of Henry James's life in
The Master. It's a fabulous reader and one of the
(29:58):
best fictionalized account for writer's life I've ever read. And
if you prefer him Anna Scorthy Mode, don't go past
the wonderful Nora Webster. Mothers always play a crucial role
in toy Binn's work, and Norah Webster is in part
based on his own mother's life. It's wonderful. Lastly, his
book on James Baldwin is terrific too. He's yet to
(30:22):
write a book about Costco Chicken, to the best of
my knowledge. You can find all these books and any
other we mentioned in the episode at your favorite independent bookstore.
That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
please tell your friends and rate and review us. It
helps a lot. Read This as a Schwartz Media production,
(30:43):
made possible by the generous support of ar Group. The
show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing
by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcho. Big
thank you this week to Shane Anderson, who edited the episode,
and Sarah McPhee. Thanks for listening. See you next week.
I truly love the novels of Column Toybin. I think
perhaps my favorite, still all these years on, remains his
nineteen ninety two book The heather Blazing. It's the story
of a retired High Court judge in smalltown Ennescorthy in
County Wexford, reflecting on his life and his memories. I
(00:21):
was still a teenager when I read it, devouring grown
up books that I barely understood. And honestly, there's no
reason a teenager in Melbourne, Australia should have been so
blown away by a book that's frankly about old age,
about an old man shut off from his emotions and
his family, dealing with the erosion of the order and
certainties with which he scaffolded his life. Rereading it now,
(00:45):
I can see two things. Column Toybin is a superb writer,
and I was probably a pretty weird kid. The heather
Blazing was only his second book, and in subsequent years
he built a name as one of the language's finest
contemporary novelists. He's perhaps best known for his sixth novel,
(01:06):
two thousand and nine's hugely successful literary sensation Brooklyn, which
plays to Enna Scorthy front and center. It's the story
of Eilish Lacey, a young woman who leaves Ireland for
the promise of a new, less claustrophobic existence in America. There,
she meets and falls in love with a young plumber
called Tony Fiarella. When the death of her sister takes
(01:28):
Eilish back to Ireland, she secretly marries Tony before she leaves,
but on her return home she finds herself slipping back
into her old life, a friendship with Nancy, a burgeoning
romance with Jim Farrell. It's a modern classic. It captivated
audiences and was adapted into an equally acclaimed film starring
Sorcia Ronan and Dominal Gleeson. Now Toybin has returned to
(01:54):
Enna Scorthy and to Ailish Lacy, whereas Brooklyn ends on
a note of hope for the new world, with Elish
returning to America and Tony. The opening of Long Island
picks up the action two decades on, with the Elish
being accosted by an angry neighbor. His wife is pregnant
to Tony. I'm Michael Williams and this is read This
(02:18):
I show about the books we love and the sequels
that follow them.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, I was having thoughts or I was having something
about four that the idea of writing a novel, which
would be plot lad plot lad means that every single
thing must move as an arrow moves towards some sort
of point, and that if you're not doing that, it
would the scene you will attempt to write, For example,
(02:52):
if you deviate for a second and give people extra
feelings or extra scenes or moments between two characters, that
will fall away as you the author reads the book,
but it's not needed that you're following the what normally
has been really taken over. I suppose by the detective
writer that everything really must move, even if ingeniously or
(03:16):
not directly, but it must move towards a point. And
so that that was really the aim in Long Island.
And you see, the word sequel only came up when
the book was delivered and people were trying to work
out how we're going to place this book. What's going
to the jacket was and the word sequel started. And
I hadn't really put a thought into it, in the
(03:37):
way that you often don't put it thought into something
for good reasons, because you're avoiding thinking about it. And
the problem is that this has been the most successful
book of man commercially. So here am I jumping on
the bandwagon and riding it the retired horse to death.
I suppose. The first thing is that I got a
lot of energy from the film. And I know that
(03:58):
a lot of writers have had nightmares of having their
work completely destroyed by an awful scriptwriter and director. And
I saw the film a lot in a short space
of time, and I had to grow up at the
stage and say something about it. So I would always
just sit in the centiment and watch it. And those
things end up having a big effect on you, because
of course it's your own emotions to start with, taking
(04:22):
over by someone and then given back to you, and
that's a very powerful business.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, one of the
things that struck me about the film as an adaptation
is the end hits a couple of different beats or
a couple of different notes to the ones that you
did yourself in the novel, and mainly about Alisha and
her decisions, mainly about how active and how clear she
(04:48):
is on the decision to go with Tony and be
back in Brooklyn, and gives that kind of gives that
much more solid idea about this is where I belong to.
This is whereas the novel, as I remember it, is
far more elliptical about how she's feeling about all of it.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Oh, and it is kind of ambivuous. She doesn't really
know what to do. She drifts and she's forced back
in the novel. I think the film wanted to give
her more agency, as they call it, than I wanted
to give her. But I'm a sucker for that very
last scene, which I didn't write. Nick Hornby wrote it,
where she's across the road and Tony comes out of
it a shop.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
They've been doing some work with his brother.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
His brother sees her first, and then they see each other,
and I just cheer up, because, you know, because I
couldn't write that.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
That question of Eilish's agency is kind of central to
the ways in which she has changed and grown as
a character in the intervening decades between the two books.
Some of the readings of her as a protagonist in
Brooklyn would have it that she was passive. I don't
think that's quite right, but she was certainly circumspect, and
(05:54):
as we find her in Long Island, she has more grit.
She is sharper. She is far more directive in her life.
Was that a deliberate decision in terms of how you
were going to characterize her twenty years on?
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Yeah? That in another word, she can't be dreamy.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
In the previous book, she drifted along, she went with things,
she went with the flow, and people liked her and
looked after her. But she didn't come to America to
take New York. But now she's built a castle in
the sense she's made a family. She's had two children,
and even though you know there are a problem with
the in laws, they're not great problems. She's got a
wonderful relationship with her children. And just before the opening
(06:35):
of the book, he realized that, well, she has just
built her world.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
There's this wonderful early scene where, having been too forthright
at one of her in law's big family lunches, kind
of horrifyingly, there is an outsider watching people talk all
over each other, watching these rituals to which she barely belongs.
She's too forthright, and then by mutual agreement no longer
attends them. And there's a wonderful scene that comes out
(07:01):
of that where she gets the Sunday New York Times
for herself, and that opens up this entirely different existence.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah, there's a funny thing happened in suburbs and in
provincial places in the late sixties early seventies is that
women who were not involved actively and openly with feminism,
feminism swept in under their doors in some way.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
You know.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
It came in the letter box, it came to the television,
of course, the radio, but it happened at home.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
It happened in our house.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Where my mother moved from a newspaper called The arsh Press,
which really wasn't very good to the Irish Times, which
was considered sort of Protestant liberal newspaper in Ireland and
had really good coverage of the arts and really very
well written articles, and it was obviously it was the
intellectual paper. And my mother started to first of all
swap it with the neighbor, but then she decided to
(07:54):
get it herself. It was a very big move and
I think it changed things in the house. And it's
almost done a matter now because of course people can
just go online and find everything. But those things were
very big changes that occurred families in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I'm interested in what you're saying about the castle that
Alish has created in the family. One of the things
that's so touching in those early scenes, even though we
see them filtered through the animating disaster that sets the
plot into sequence, is that not just English, but Tony's
also a really good parent, Like the two of them
(08:30):
have what seems to be very lovely relationships with their
very nice children. All of that is delivered in a
way that is devoid of kind of false drama or
friction or tension.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, you see, it was Tony's already been demonized at
the opening of the books. You'd be very careful not
to go on with that, not to kick him when
he's down, as it were. So therefore, he particularly has
a relationship with his daughter, and he's had since she
was a baby. And he's one of those fathers you know,
who just can't stop looking at their chat their daughter.
So you know, that's very important that that that bond
(09:04):
is there.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
You know, what happens that the openly the novel is a.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Big blow simply because we're talking about simple happiness, but
a simple happiness that eighties has created very very carefully,
and so, yeah, I was interested in all that.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
How important is it that the bearer of the news
about Tony's infidelity is an Irishman rather than an American
or an Italian? Or how much does it matter that
it's a shouting Irishman who sets the thing off?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
It matters enormously because I can't write American dialogue.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
And there we are.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (09:37):
In other words, how what would an American's anger be? Like?
Speaker 2 (09:42):
What words would he use? And also what's his own background?
Because it would matter enormously. Is he, for example, is
he from the Midwest? Is he local?
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Is he? What is he?
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I would have no idea. I would get one word wrong,
and in getting one word wrong, I would get the
sort of grammar of the moment wrong. The important thing
she has to be able to judge is he saying
something he means? Is he saying something true? Is he threatening?
Are his threats empty? She has to be able to
read that. Now, how do you read that if you're
(10:13):
in such a foreign country.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
It's very hard to interpret all that.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
That question of foreignness and of speaking a different language
runs right through this book, as it did with Brooklyn.
You know you've named both of these novels after the
talismanic place where she makes a new home in America.
But actually, weirdly, Brooklyn is quite absent from Brooklyn, and
Long Island is largely absent from Long Island. Why did
(10:40):
you send her those places in the naming of the books.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yes, she doesn't experience Brooklyn, you know. In other words,
it's happened. It's happened with so many people. The emigrant
experience is so much about missing things, not just missing
home that that's an easy thing to work out. Yeah,
they miss home, but missing what's actually happening in that
sort of texture and flavor of the place.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I think it happens with a young woman more.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Because she's she's not going to be feel free in
the streets or the bars or the stadiums in the
same way. But Long Island was what Tony promised her,
and it happened for I was in the choir in
the Catholic church. I think it was an upper west
Side around eighty sixth Street on the west side, and
the church was completely Irish Catholic except there were no
(11:24):
there were no Irish people left.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I said that the priest to of course was Hispanic.
And where did all the Irish go.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So they went out of the island, out of Long Island,
you know, in the in the Great those funny migrations
in cities, people might have gone from the Upper West
Side to Brooklyn, and the next generation wanted a garden,
and they went they went to the Long Island.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
M It's also significant that she's in a cul deer
sect that in many ways mirrors the curtain twitching kind
of existence that she was so keen to escape, the scrutinized.
Every time you step out the front door, her sisters
in law standing in the doorway one at a time,
so they're not making up the numbers that they'll be noticed.
(12:07):
It's kind of very funny the way all of that
stuff is observed.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Yeah, again, it's suited by darker purpose.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Tony promises her this, they're going to build four houses,
and that's what they do.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
They build four houses.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
But of course it meets means for me and I
have to worry too much about, you know, and like
what day does she visit her mother? And none of
they're all gathered together, so it just made it much
easier if they were all living there, so they could
all encroach on her at various times and not others.
You see, the problem with the Long Island thing is
that it's very thin in the sense that she's married,
(12:40):
she's got two kids. That's her world. She doesn't go
to Irish bar, isn't involved in lookal politics. It's just
needven in the library. She goes to work. But again
you can only get a certain amount out of the
job or the house. So I needed one more drama.
And the drama course is the drama of Tony's family,
is the drama of another enclave.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Again, it has to come. I feel careful with it.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Her mother in law has to be very kind and
decent in a whole lot of different ways, and you
know there's no one in making her an ogre. But
the two women do have a particular problem over what issue,
and Aligh becomes from this nonchalant, drifting, passive circumspect figure.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
She becomes right stubborn on one matter.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
From a craft perspective, one of the things that's so
astonished me in Long Island is how well you manage
to create a sense of her purpose and of her
character while at the same time denying us too much interiority.
And maybe it's a function of the way in which
you approach plot in this book, or maybe it's a
(13:47):
function of the fact that once she does get back
to Ireland, you move into a kind of polyphonic mode
where we get different perspectives driving the narrative at different times.
But was that a very deliberate decision not to have
us in her head wallowing with the kind of the
(14:07):
angst and the personal dilemma?
Speaker 2 (14:09):
The problem is that if you do that, you can
do it once. You can't then do it twice. You
can't have it again and again and again. You know,
on Monday she felt this thing towards Tony. She went
over in her mind what she knew, Well, what did.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
She do on Tuesday?
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And so you can have that to a certain extent,
but what she does becomes more important than what she thinks.
But I had to soften that a bit because there's
a moment where she goes out onto Jones Beach and
she goes for a walk and suddenly she realizes that
or the reader realizes that her own life has become
a sort of set of memories, that it isn't merely
a new experience after new experience, that the business of
(14:44):
being on that beach with those kids when they were small,
with Tony, when they were just married, that all of
that has become very soft and now suddenly sharp memory
for her. She suddenly has put down roots in memory
on Long Island, which he certainly wasn't where she'd done before.
So I thought that was what I would do, rather
than have her constantly going into her thoughts for two pages,
(15:09):
because I felt that those tots are pretty circumscribed in
the book in the sense that she is recovering from
what she's heard about Tony. She is remembering various things
that happened with Tony's family to see piecing together how
she has ended like this on Long Island before she
will go just so that when she's back in Ireland,
you have an extra underplot, which is not merely what
(15:29):
she sees in Ireland, but that there is a past
now that will some way pull her back towards American.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Coming up after the break column shares the American cultural
forces that have shaped his work, from James Baldwin to Well,
You're not going to guess the second one. Toybin has
(15:59):
in other interviews express this fear that sequels are typically
disappointing to my mind. Long Island escapes that curse very effectively,
firstly because it stands on its own as a propulsive, charming,
thoughtful novel, but more importantly for the legions of fans
of Brooklyn, because it's not a retread. When Ailish returns
(16:20):
to Ireland, the characters from Brooklyn who she left behind
have built on their own lives and moved on in
different ways. More crucially, given that Brooklyn culminated in a
love triangle of sorts, Jim, the other man who she
might have ended up with, has pieced together his life
after being left behind, running a bar and beginning a
relationship with Ailish's old friend Nancy. And a big part
(16:44):
of how toy Bin departs from Brooklyn in Long Island
is his decision to give sections of the novel to
both Jim and Nancy so that we might hear their
perspective on events and understand what they have at stake.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Because she's been away, there's so many things she doesn't know,
And how do you work with the reader when the
reader needs to know something that Ali doesn't know. Now
you can tell the reader as the author, and this
doesn't work. The reader gets tired of being told things.
So therefore I realize the best way to try this
was to try it from three sides. In otherwise you
would have a big chunk at the beginning from Ali's respective.
(17:21):
You would move then to part two and you would
have Oh, someone called Nancy, and the reader, I would hope,
seems oddly satisfied. Oh, I know Aleish, I know why
she's home. I know the whole story. Nancy doesn't know
the whole story. And then you realize, but what you've
told about Nancy, Alish doesn't know. So his business of
not knowing becomes I think almost the subject of the book,
or the effort to make a secret energy in the
(17:43):
book is who knows what?
Speaker 3 (17:44):
But mainly who doesn't know what? But the reader always knows.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
How important is that? Structurally is a way to approach
characters who, for one reason or another are repressing both
their feelings and their their desires.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure there's that much repression
in the sense that you're dealing with ninety seventy six,
So you're dealing with the period in Ireland where you
could still have a long engagement when people got engaged
before they got married, and so you're dealing with the
whole business that since Nancy's daughter is engaged, Nancy doesn't
want to announce her engagement because we're cut across her daughter.
(18:22):
So then not that depends on that secret, which is
really done out of good manners. It's done out of
just not wanting to upset the daughter, rather than being
done out of any sort of you know, repression. For example,
the Catholic Church plays almost no part in the book,
and there's a nice priest. He just helped people get
married and does those things waves and you know, everyone
goes to Mass, but there's no big Catholic sort of
(18:45):
repression in them.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
You're right, maybe repression is too loaded a word, particularly
in an Irish context, but I guess I mean kind
of stifled, you know. Jim. Jim is a man who
has lived his life kind of bettening down the feelings
because he's kind of in a constant state of mortification.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Yeah, but it's also that he owns a bar, because
if you own a bar and you've got a reputation
for being a gossip, people wouldn't like that. So you
behind the bar, you hear everything. You're moving back and forth.
He's been there all his life. He's father with there
before him, just watching everything, making sure that everything's okay,
but saying nothing. What I've got to do with him
then is to treat him like a character from Jane Austen.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
So he has all that stuff in the bar downstairs.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
But he goes upstairs at night, and he's on his
own in that big house, and he's got a big
room to sit, and he can drink, and he amount
have giny wants, and he's uneasy in his solitude. And
what he really wants is he's a man who wants
to get married, who should be sharing.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
His bed with the woman. And therefore it's not a problem.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
When Nancy comes along, even though they've known other other lives,
but she seems so lively and so ready for life
and so filled with things, and so there's absolutely no problem.
They're in their forties, they're going to get married. And
this is again another sort of moment of perfection. Jim
is going to have his problems solved by this very
busy woman who's Nancy. And then you can come in
(20:07):
under that where the first story begins to impinge on
the stay.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
When you describe it that way, it makes me see
you as much more the monster than i'd originally kind
of conceived you.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Well, what I'm interested in doing is dramatizing, and for
dramatization only disruption, And therefore.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
You could use the word monster, but you can also
use the word novelist.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
They're interchangeable terms. I'm convinced of that. I think in
many ways this might be your funniest book. Bits of
it absolutely tickled me in ways that I was just
delighted by sequences. Particularly, Ailish's mother has a wonderful turn
of phrase when she's furious at the idea of an
(20:48):
eightieth birthday party and is gleefully talking about the neighbor
who drank too much gin and lemonade and died the
next day.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yes, she died of a birthday party one day.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
It was the next day was a hearse.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
But there's a There's a scene towards the end which
is sort of really important for the book, and I
was hesitant about it at first, but for it, it's
the whole idea of someone getting married a second time,
and Ali's mother has a very strong view on this,
where she says, well, when your father was dying, it
was a great comfort to both of us that we
would meet again in heaven.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Now, if I were to marry again, how would this work?
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Surely I would meet him and the other man in heaven,
and we'd have to sort of work out a modus
for Vendi in the upper in the upper air. And
she was almost making joke, but at the same time
there was a sort of serious element in this that
the Catholicism, it's so much there that they don't have
to go on about it too much. But the mother
has a very nice time explaining when no one should
(21:46):
be married again on the basis the shoot disappointment on
arrival in heaven to find that your wife has a
new husband.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
The idea of heavenly social embarrassment is a very precise
One's Oh God, all right, now, sickens are coming home
to roost. One of the things that Long Island, it
seems to me, is about, is the consequences of the
drama of Brooklyn, that actually, at the end of Brooklyn
you can have a triumphant or a purposeful moment where
(22:16):
Alish makes her choice and follows the path through to
the next chapter of her life. Long Island again and
again comes to the kind of detritus that's left behind
from that kind of choice, the disappointment, the sense of betrayal,
and in her dynamic with her mother in Long Island,
we see that almost most acutely, her mother is one
(22:38):
thing with her daughter, another thing with her grandchildren. She
is both hoarding the letters from America and at the
same time not giving elish any idea that she's read them.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
See, I think this is a fundamental Irish story in
that the disruption to life from the eighteen forties onwards
was it's someone in everything. Family left, and their leaving
was messy. They went up for work, they went when
they were very young, but they left behind them some
idea that something had not occurred that should have occurred,
(23:10):
and they brought with them to Australia, or to America
or to England. There's a constant sense of an unfinished life,
and some societies have been built on this, such as
the United States, such as Australia, and some countries then
have been aimed by it, which is Ireland and so
the novel almost every image it for deciding her mother
(23:31):
doesn't have the right things in her kitchen, and her
mother resenting the fact that she's having like a sil charity.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Is coming from America.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
But the fact that also that maybe all the time
she should never have gone, and that what has happened
to disrupt their relationship is essentially disastrous and causes nothing
but trouble as she attempts to marry an Italian and
move into his world in a country that neither of
them is from, so that all of that businesses there
(24:00):
in the novel. In otherwise, my effort was to try
and get it the size of a postage stamp, to
bring it down to the intimate, to try and take
the epic out of it, to see what I could do,
then to use a minimalist form to suggest an epic moment.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
On that minimalist mode, I read an interview with you
where you talked about the process of stripping back for
Long Island, getting rid of simile and meta four and
everything you could, just to pair it right back, fighting
your rightly instincts.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
This is partly the pandemic, you know, where I suddenly
had a lot of time, which is how the book
got started. Then when I delivered it, it wasn't going
to be printed for a year, and I wasn't going
to be published for eighteen months, so I had ten
or eleven months, and what I started to do was
just to read it, just just just to take it,
print it out and read it. Other than the Jones
(24:54):
Beach thing, I don't think I added anything, but I
certainly took scenes out.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Once they went out, they fell away. I never missed them.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
I'm gonna let you go in a second, but I
can't let you go without There are two topics I
wanted to touch on briefly before we finish up. The
first one is James Baldwin and the second one is Costco.
Two topics on which you have enthused passionately to my
great pleasure, in the past twelve months. And tell me
about Baldwin and what he means to you as a writer.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
First off, you know, trying to find somebody else other
than James Joyce who went through religion, who had, you know,
problems about being sort of dissident from almost religious upbringing,
brought up in a very close community, interested in the
melody around prose, you know, trying to find a pro
(25:47):
style that matched in some way levels of raised feeling.
And I read Baldwin when I I mean I read
the Rotel on the Mountain when I was eighteen, realizing
after that he wrote Giovanni's Room and realized that that journey,
but then the journey into the essays, the journey to
becoming one of the great sort of I thought of
the great political thinkers.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
No matter what was going on politically, his.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Line on it made up of these great essays, a
thousand page book of great essays and essays that no
matter what year they were written in a lot of
them were written in the fifties and sixties, are absolutely
still urgent in a way that very few essays are.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Norman Mailer's essays are not surviving. Well.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
I think John Didion has survived. I mean that those
essays still sing, and I think Baldwin's do so he
just just generally it was.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
A great figure. Costco is where.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
They've got a big phone call from the editor in
America saying, your book's on sailing Costco And I didn't
know what that meant, but it's a big deal because
it means that people go to the shop in Costco
like they want to take things away, and they buy chickens,
and they buy all sorts of masses of toilet paper, Anyway,
this book Long Adam is going to be I bought
by Costco, which again they buy very few books. They
(27:02):
have to run a table in the middle of everything else,
and people just tend to put one into their basket
as start going by. So it's a very important business.
And I got interviewed by a woman who was from
the Costco magazine, and I loved that. I just felt
I felt that I was moving towards the center of
American life, you know, instead of being cozy on the
margins with my New Yorker.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
And New York Review book.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
So we're coming in from doing a reading on Long
Island in the library, and the woman from the publishing house,
he said to me, why don't we just stop off
in Costco. I said, I'm great, I'd love to do that.
But I started just to pretend I was employed by
Costco to do an ad for their chicken. And so
I held up the chicken and I came up with
I think a very good slogan that I think, you know,
(27:43):
said this chicken is filled with chickenness. And then I
was able to show there was right beside my book,
and that my book was here, and the chicken was there,
and by saying the chicken was good, I was implying
that my book was good.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
And then we went off again and it ended up
on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Just a look at it, at this chicken, at the
size of it.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
You are man of chickenness in the chicken.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
And honestly this is true. There was a young, reasonably
famous American poet in Dublin and I was at a
thing and this poet came up to me. I thought
he might say, I've read one of your books, or
you know, I read an article you wrote or something
about you.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
And he said, hold on, are you the Costco guy?
Are you the chicken guy?
Speaker 2 (28:23):
And I said, yeah, yeah, that's that's my claim to fame.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
It's I am glad you're able to kind of hold
many claimers to fame in the one package. But I
will say that your book is full of book noters,
book notus from front to back, as it's an absolute tree.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Well, thank you very much, Michael, Thank you very much
for saying that.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Well, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Okay, thank you.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Colin toy Bin's latest novel is Long Island, and you
can find it in all good bookstores now and news
for those toy Bin fans in Melbourne and Sydney, column
is coming to town. He's going to be at Melbourne Writers'
Festival on Wednesday May twenty first and Sydney Writers' Festival
on Friday May twenty third. You can go to both
(29:14):
those festival's websites to get information and get yourself some tickets.
At Sydney Writers' Festival, he will be in conversation with
me and also previous read this guest, Charlotte Wood. We're
going to talk about Australian writing versus Irish writing and
I hope to see some of.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
You there.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Before we get out of here. Instead of sharing what
I've been reading this week, I wanted to let you
know some other excellent entry points to Calmn Toybin's work.
He received his second book, a prize shortlisting and endless
acclaim for his magisterial novelization of Henry James's life in
The Master. It's a fabulous reader and one of the
(29:58):
best fictionalized account for writer's life I've ever read. And
if you prefer him Anna Scorthy Mode, don't go past
the wonderful Nora Webster. Mothers always play a crucial role
in toy Binn's work, and Norah Webster is in part
based on his own mother's life. It's wonderful. Lastly, his
book on James Baldwin is terrific too. He's yet to
(30:22):
write a book about Costco Chicken, to the best of
my knowledge. You can find all these books and any
other we mentioned in the episode at your favorite independent bookstore.
That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
please tell your friends and rate and review us. It
helps a lot. Read This as a Schwartz Media production,
(30:43):
made possible by the generous support of ar Group. The
show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing
by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcho. Big
thank you this week to Shane Anderson, who edited the episode,
and Sarah McPhee. Thanks for listening. See you next week.
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