His Irish Diaspora - Colm Toibin

As he watched the line form for communion, Colm Toibin kept his seat. “I’ve got sin on my soul,” he whispered, because he hadn’t been to confession in years. We pressed our knees sideways so the people in our pew could get by. Was he sure he didn’t want to get in line? He nodded. “Funny,” he said of the religion he grew up with. “You still wouldn’t mess with it.”

It made sense to be somewhere with this acclaimed novelist while he observed, rather than participated in, what was going on around him. Toibin first came to the Oratory Church of St. Boniface in Downtown Brooklyn a few years ago, when he was teaching in Texas and homesick for Ireland, and his friend, the writer Robert Sullivan, brought him. The spare beauty of this Catholic church and the unanticipated solace of hearing the words from his childhood made such an impression on Toibin, a former altar boy from County Wexford, that he used it as a landmark in his newest novel, “Brooklyn.” It is the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman who emigrates from Ireland in the early 1950s and lives on the same block as Sullivan in Cobble Hill. The priest who sponsors her is from this church; key scenes are set at an adjoining parish hall.

Only there isn’t one. I arrived before Toibin and looked for it high and low. He laughed when I told him so. “I made it up,” he crowed.

While making it up is an integral part of a novelist’s job, what’s invented is sometimes hard to discern in Toibin’s work. There is such a distinct sense of place in his books and stories, his characters are drawn so indelibly — maybe because of his roots as a journalist — that it’s often hard to remember they’re not real. Toibin has been short-listed twice for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, the first time for “The Blackwater Lightship” (1999), about three generations of women in an estranged Irish family coming together to care for a son who is dying of AIDS, and for “The Master” (2004), an artfully nuanced depiction of Henry James, the self-exiled American writer living in Europe, and of the tremendous conflict between his yearnings for intimacy and for privacy, a frequent theme in Toibin’s work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03toibin-t.html?th&emc=th