Born in 1955, Colm Tóibín has written short stories, poetry, plays, essays and even opera libretti. He remains best known as a novelist, garnering laurels including the International Dublin literary award and the David Cohen prize for literature, and being praised for his sheer range as well as a near-magical ability to capture all that goes unsaid in life. His greatest commercial success to date is Brooklyn (2009), which follows Eilis Lacey as she leaves her home town – and Tóibín’s own – of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, for greater opportunities in the US. It later became a film starring Saoirse Ronan. His 11th novel, Long Island, is the sequel he swore he’d never write, catching up with Eilis two decades on. Tóibín divides his time between Los Angeles and New York City, where he teaches English literature at Columbia University.
Long Island is on the shortlist for Waterstones book of the year, which must be nice…
It cheers you up. You work tentatively as a writer – you think this might work and that might work but you’re trying things. This is one of the ways where you feel that maybe you got something right.
You’re not a fan of sequels. Have you changed your opinion in light of Long Island’s reception?
I haven’t. The idea that a novel would have a sequel, that the ending is merely provisional, I think really makes a difference to the experience of reading the book. A novel is not a line, it doesn’t just chug along like a train. It is an actual arc, and you have to have a real sense of that as a reader.
So why did you make an exception?
Long Island is set 20 years later and has an entirely different structure to Brooklyn. It moves only according to the rules of plot, so it is a different book in that sense.
Did returning to characters you first conjured into being in 2009 make you aware of changes in yourself as a writer?
I saw the film [Brooklyn] a good lot. Normally, in film and novels, Irishmen are unreliable, charming, brooding. It makes making an Irishman who’s quiet and stable particularly difficult. Jim in Brooklyn is a very nice fellow but he’s not the point of the book. The actor Domhnall Gleeson managed to give him a sort of glow, a strange power that came from his quietness. I saw a new way his character could be done, so Jim in Long Island derived partly from my watching of the film. I can’t find a precedent for it, where a novelist gets a gift like that.
Do you continue to think of Ireland as home, and if so, do you get homesick?
Yes. It’s the music that gets me. My partner will say: “Oh my God, he’s putting on the music…” I could on a given night, for no reason, find myself listening to some song, like Kevin Burke and Micheál Ó Domhnaill’s Lord Franklin, and then I’ll put on another… It’s like being a drunken Irishman, except I don’t drink any more.
How often do you go back to Enniscorthy?
I’ve just been there now because the opera I wrote the libretto for, Lady Gregory in America, was on at Wexford Festival Opera. I like to think of it as the people’s opera – it was on at 11 in the morning and it only cost €25 [£21] to go to. A lot of local people booked and there was a nice feeling. I’ll be back for Christmas.
Ireland today is very different from the country you grew up in and left in the 1970s. For starters, it’s a lot easier to be gay…
It’s a much freer place. The gay thing was odd and unexpected because it was a conservative movement. It was families saying we want our families to be strengthened by the presence of our gay son, and the gay son saying I want my own family. It was the two words that the church had taken from us that we took back: family and love.
As a teenager, you thought seriously about becoming a priest. Do you have any residual faith?
Oh, residual – I’m all residual! But no, I’m an atheist.
You underwent treatment for aggressive cancer in 2018. Were you tempted to try to revive your religious beliefs?
It never arose. It was a very secular time – dosage, different medicines, sleep. There wasn’t a spiritual moment.
LA seems an unlikely place for you to have landed. There’s a perception that it’s unintellectual – somehow “lite”…
None of that’s true. The only thing you can’t do here is flaneur around. You really live in your back yard and your life depends on the quality of your back yard, where the sun falls and where the shadows fall, and where the pomegranate tree is and where the passion fruit vine is. It’s a funny thing if you’re Irish to talk about – not where the potatoes and the cabbages are.
We should probably talk about Donald Trump. Were you shocked by the US election result?
I was. It’s a disaster – it sets everything back. There’s no area in which Trump’s presence in America is in any way helpful, and there’s something grotesque about the people around him. I’ve utter contempt for Mitch McConnell [the outgoing Senate minority leader and staunch Trump ally].
Do you think his presidency will have a draining effect on the nation’s creative industries, as energies are focused on activism?
The thing to do is to close the door and get on with making books. It’s what WB Yeats said about the funeral of Parnell in Ireland in 1891 – now, after politics has utterly failed us, the imagination can come to the fore. It would have been better were it the other way around.
What are your thoughts on turning 70 next year?
It’s very old. There’s nothing else to be said.
Long Island is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
