Colm Toibin's 'chicklit' novel makes him No 1
Books Editor John Spain on the popular success of a literary writer
To get to the top of the bestseller list these days it helps if you're a writer like Cecelia Ahern or Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer, the woman who writes the Twilight books about a lovelorn teenage vampire. Or you could even try being Jordan or Jamie Oliver.
What you do not want to be is a serious writer, a writer of literary novels. You've no chance if you do that. Even when John Banville's book The Sea won the Booker prize in 2005, it failed to get to the No 1 spot in the bestseller list. And it was the same with Anne Enright when she won the Booker in 2007 with The Gathering. Both got high up the charts, but the top spot eluded them.
Yet over the last few weeks an extraordinary thing has happened. The new novel by Colm Toibin, one of our most literary writers, has taken over the top spot in the bestseller chart here. Toibin, who has been shortlisted twice for the Booker, has had the kind of runaway popular success usually enjoyed only by the top chicklit or thriller writers.
Toibin's new novel Brooklyn, launched in Dublin three weeks ago, went straight to No 1 in the Nielsen Bestseller chart for Ireland in its first week in the shops -- and it stayed there. This is its third week at No 1 and it's still selling in shedloads.
So what's going on? Well, one leading bookseller who prefers to remain anonymous, says that the answer is simple: Although Toibin is one of Ireland's most highbrow writers, his new book is "basically a chicklit story".
Certainly the story in Brooklyn is a simple, straightforward one, about a young woman who emigrates from Wexford to New York in the early 1950s. It's a gentle story full of nostalgia for a more innocent time, when life was simpler but somehow more vivid. It's a story that brilliantly evokes the 1950s both in an Irish country town and in an Irish area in New York.
Perhaps more important from a sales point of view, it's also the story of the emotional life of one young woman, of the slights and snobberies she faces in smalltown Ireland, of the challenges and liberation of America ... of learning to stand on her own two feet in a strange place, of discovering her sexuality, and eventually of being torn between two men, one in Ireland and one in America.
Indeed, judged just by the storyline, Brooklyn is essentially a "chicklit" novel, the kind of accessible popular fiction that appeals to a mass audience, mainly female.
People in the book trade who read Brooklyn before it was published predicted that the novel would introduce Toibin to a vast new popular fiction audience, the kind of readers who buy books by Marian Keyes and Maeve Binchy. They were expecting Brooklyn to be a major bestseller and that view has been proven right by the sales of the novel over the past three weeks. So clearly the book has bridged the divide between the literary novel and popular fiction.
Applying the chicklit label to Brooklyn may seem facile, or even unfair, but Toibin himself has no problem with the comparison. "If women -- or men -- who read Marian Keyes or Maeve Binchy like this book, that would be wonderful because Marian and Maeve have millions of readers all over the world," Toibin says.
"My last book, The Master, was a more complex novel about the life of the writer Henry James and that may have put some people off. Brooklyn is a simple story and that makes it more accessible. But I think that within simplicity one can get to deeper levels of truth. It's a matter of stripping away and revealing. The simplicity can be more interesting and more telling."
Toibin has always been reluctant to be dismissive of the better popular fiction. He has spoken before about his admiration for the work ethic of Cecelia Ahern. "Writing is about spending hours in a room alone; we all have to do that and Cecelia certainly does it." Although some of the books that make it to the top of the bestseller chart are rubbish, there are some popular fiction writers, like Marian Keyes, who are much better than the chicklit label suggests, he says. "Some of the popular fiction writers are really good. If all the people reading Marian Keyes were reading me as well, I would be very happy."
So has he, for the sake of extra sales, sold out?
"I did not deliberately set out to write a more popular book. I never think about who's going to read a book when I'm writing it. To do that would be disastrous," he says.
"I'm in America a lot these days (teaching at Princeton) and I began to think about emigration, about the experience of it, about what it must have been really like back then ... and that was what sparked the story.
"It did not need to be written in a complicated way. It just came out the way it did. And, of course, the theme is very relevant today. The pain of homesickness, the strangeness of a new place; people feel that, whether they are Poles living in Dublin or Irish living in New York."
Brooklyn, Toibin's sixth novel, tells the story of Eilis Lacey who leaves the claustrophobic, jobless 1950s Enniscorthy for New York, where she lives in an Irish boarding house in Brooklyn and works in a local department store.
She is homesick and miserable but eventually the pain of leaving Wexford is buried beneath the experiences and rhythms of her new life and she slowly finds a sort of happiness and meets a man. As she falls in love, news from home forces her back to Ireland -- to new possibilities -- yet also to a terrible choice: between love and personal freedom and what her duty requires.
The summary of Toibin's novel sounds like archetypal popular fiction. But calling it chicklit is missing the point. There is an enormous difference between Brooklyn and the average chicklit novel, dozens of which are published every year. The difference is in the quality of the writing, the subtlety of the observation, the way every nuance in the interaction between the characters is picked up, the way Toibin inhabits the mind of Eilis, the way he completely recreates the world of the 1950s when young women like Eilis were more passive and often became victims of fate and circumstance.
So, although Brooklyn may seem like a simple story, it is a novel with as much depth as Toibin's other more 'literary' books. It's just possible that this is a bestseller that will go on and finally win the Booker for him.
"There is too much nonsense written about 'popular' and 'serious' fiction," Toibin says. "What should count is how much pleasure a book gives a reader. That's really all that matters."
- JOHN SPAIN
