Colm Tóibín is hardly known for “hooks,” but he certainly has one here. The author, who's specialized in the novelized lives of repressed literary masters with elaborate prose styles — Henry James in “The Master,” Thomas Mann in “The Magician” — returns in “Long Island” to his other register, the deceptively simpler storytelling of ordinary lives, and to the familiar territory of his enormously popular book, the 2009 novel “Brooklyn” (later made into an equally popular film starring Saoirse... Read this story
