You couldn’t find a better spring-break read than Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, a brief novel — too brief because you want Toibin to tell you more and more — about Eilis Lacey who emigrates from Ireland to New York after World War II.

Being a fan of Henry James and having previously read Toibin’s The Master, which was good, but perhaps only to those who fashion that they can channel Henry James when reading his novels, I found in Brooklyn a novel that reminded me of James’s ability to write from the point of view of a woman. But the novel’s period is later than James’s life, just after WWII, though you won’t find the war here except in scarcity and setting and the ways in which men and women connect. At one point Tony, Eilis’s lover and a voluble Italian-American, becomes somber when Eilis mentions the Jewish corporate-law professor at her college who lost his family during the Holocaust, but that’s about it for the war.

Because of the controlled conversations, the restraint in expressing ideas and emotions –  at one point Eilis thinks to herself that she’s happy that Tony has secrets that she knows nothing about — I frequently found myself stopping to wonder how Eilis and Tony might have been like my mom and dad, who became engaged during the war when my dad was fighting in Europe.

Surely Toibin’s diction and syntax are not Jamesian. Toibin writes cleanly and sparingly. Never did I find myself lost in his sentences. But like James, Toibin presents his protagonist, Eilis Lacey, with such understanding and compassion that you, the reader, will feel sad by the end of the novel that your time with Eilis has come to an end.