Brooklyn

Ed Thompson writes:

The reviews are as high as I’ve ever seen, even beating out Star Wars.

I looked that up and I agree with you: this movie seems to be extremely well liked by the mainstream critics, almost to a person. Nonetheless, it is a good movie.

I read the novel after seeing the movie. I agree with Nell K.’s negative assessment of the novel.

The novel has some major virtues, as does the movie. It is very well written; it’s style is spare and essentialized. It is beautifully underwritten, and makes its point by showing you, not telling you; it puts in many small, understated touches to milk it theme. It is not trendy. It purposefully presents very positive characters. 

But, like Othello, it presents very positive characters only to bring them down. The theme of the novel is “Even the good people are utterly the product of their environments, and never make significant life choices.” 

In order to present its corrupt theme, it has to present good characters. What it shows is a very good young woman, of excellent character, with a wonderful new husband, deeply in love – who cannot remain faithful to her husband for the space of a one month trip away from him.

She has no burning desire to stay in Ireland. She is not really close to her mother, nor to her friends. She is not passionately in love with Ireland as against Brooklyn. Her mother is not falling apart and does not really need her. Her job in Ireland is not as good a the job and future opportunities in Brooklyn. The man she cheats with against her husband is stressedly (and explicitly in the her own mind, in words) shown as not being as good a man as her husband.

She cheats on her husband just because she is in Ireland, rather than Brooklyn. No more reason than that. It is the cities – the environments – and not the individual persons who make the choices (hence the title of the book). She does not even choose to return to husband. She has to return, because a busybody has found out about her marriage, and threatens to expose her. 

Towards the end of the book I had two emotions: 1) I can’t stand this girl anymore, 2) This girl wouldn’t do that! I can’t stand this author.

The movie tries to fix the book. In the movie, the young woman does stand up an against a busybody in Ireland at the climax. It is a good, insightful scene, that is not in the book. But it gives the movie a rather odd quality. A good woman stands up to a busybody, and therefore returns to her husband. She doesn’t return to her husband out of love, but out of dislike of a busybody, which makes no sense.

So the movie is an attempted improvement, but still not right. The right thing to do would be put the young woman under a lot of pressure – her mother needs her very badly, she misses Ireland once she sees it again, she loves her friends, the job in Ireland is excellent – and yet the woman makes the choice not to cheat on her husband and to return to him.

I expected the book to be somehow screwed up after seeing the movie, but I wasn’t sure how, and I thought I’d be naive one more time and give it a chance. And, yes, the book does have virtues. But those virtues are there only for the sake of an evil theme.