When last we left Eilis Lacey, the young protagonist of Colm Toibín’s award-winning 2009 novel “Brooklyn,” she was hovering between two men and two countries, finally coming to a decision she presumed would chart the course of the rest of her life. It’s clear from the Oscar-nominated film that followed in 2015 that she chose to return to Tony, the Italian-American plumber in New York she hastily (and secretly) married before returning to her native Ireland (and an old flame) after her sister’s death.
But Toibín, it turns out, is not through with Eilis and her angst-ridden psyche. In his upcoming sequel, “Long Island,” which Scribner is publishing on May 7, two decades have passed, and Eilis Fiorello, longtime wife and mother of two, journeys back to her Irish hometown for her mother’s 80th birthday. Lo and behold, guess who is single and still carrying a torch for her. As you can imagine, complications ensue.
While it is curious that Toibín, who has authored multiple novels since, would wait so long to reanimate this particular woman, it is by no means uncommon for characters to pop up in subsequent works by the same author, most ingeniously in books that are not part of a series. It’s a literary tradition that dates back at least as far as Shakespeare, who concocted the corpulent, carousing knight Sir John Falstaff as a cohort in mischief for young Prince Hal in “Henry IV, Part I” and brought him back to get resoundingly repudiated in “Part II” as Hal ascends to the throne. The buffoonish Falstaff also reappears as the butt of most of the rollicking humor in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
A couple of centuries and a half later, we have Mark Twain bringing his “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” to a close, declaring “It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.” But eight years later, the rascally scamp is back as a secondary figure, the best buddy of the superstitious but uncommonly shrewd title character of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And he pops up twice more, as “Tom Sawyer Abroad” in 1894 and “Tom Sawyer, Detective” in 1896.
Twentieth-century literature of the finest sort is also replete with recurring characters. Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner built an entire trilogy—the Yoknapatawpha novels—that incorporated the unsavory Snopes family in “The Hamlet,” “The Town” and “The Mansion” between 1940 and 1959, long after first introducing some of them in “Sartoris,” “As I Lay Dying” and “The Unvanquished” in 1929, 1930 and 1938 respectively. In so doing, he put the lie to any notion that characters have to be admirable or relatable to justify their continued existence; various members of that corrupt clan included a pedophile, a murderer, a pornographer, a dishonest politician, a mentally challenged zoophile and his cousin, who sells tickets to watch the bovine perversions taking place.
There are at least a couple of celebrated authors whose continued exploration of the long life of a single character across several works of fiction have won major literary awards for their efforts. John Updike did it with his “Rabbit” tetralogy, which won the Pulitzer Prize for two of the four — “Rabbit Is Rich” in 1982 and “Rabbit at Rest” in 1991. And while Updike’s novels focused on a rather unremarkable modern American Everyman named Harry Angstrom, the late Hilary Mantel turned to a real historical figure, Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister to King Henry VIII, to produce “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Bodies” and “The Mirror and the Light,” a truly astonishing trilogy that captured the Man Booker Prize for the first two books and was adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In the pipeline: Among the new books to be published this spring are three intriguing titles that relate to real events, although only two are works of nonfiction. None are likely to be considered “light reading.” First is a memoir from novelist Salman Rushdie. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” (Random House, $28, 224 pages), which comes out on April 16, is sure to be a harrowing account of the brutal attack on a lecture stage in western New York in August of 2022 that blinded the author in the right eye and crippled his left hand. In a statement released by his publisher, Rushdie commented, “This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art.”
April 30 brings the publication of “Devil in the White City” author Erik Larson’s “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War” (Crown, $35, 592 pages). The book focuses in sharply on the volatile five months after Abraham Lincoln squeaked through the election of November 1860, leading to the bombing of Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor that marked the start of the armed hostilities that resulted in the deaths of 750,000 combatants. It was a period of such intense unrest that it caused Lincoln himself to comment that its trials “were so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
The incredibly prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel “Butcher” (Knopf, $30, 352 pages), which releases on May 21, is being labeled by the publisher as “a unique blend of fiction and fact.” Based on historical documents, it traces the grim career of a physician at a 19th-century women’s insane asylum who becomes known as “the father of gyno-psychiatry” as he subjects his patients to all sorts of horrendous surgical procedures. Quite coincidentally, like Rushdie’s, the book cover’s single and dominant image is a sharp knife!
Author alert: That much beloved dispenser of wit, wisdom and whimsy, journalist, poet, food writer, humorist and longtime New Yorker contributor Calvin Trillin has another memoir coming out, and Rakestraw Books in Danville is hosting him on Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. The new book is “The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press” (Random House, $31, 336 pages), and its listing on Amazon has a generous excerpt if you want to get an advance look. Tickets for his Rakestraw appearance are $10 and include a $10 discount on his book, but if you happen to be a high school journalism student, those prices are $5 and $5 respectively. Find out how to sign up at rakestrawbooks.com.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.