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the books. Perhaps they feel similarly about their friends, parents, children. “The trouble with my kid is that she doesn’t make me care enough about her.” Are we all supposed to nod sagely at that?)
    It is not intended to be a backhanded compliment when I say that Tóibín doesn’t care whether you care about Eilis, his heroine; it’s not that the book is chilly or neutral, or that Tóibín is a disengaged writer. He’s not. But he’s patient, and nerveless, and unsentimental, and he trusts the story rather than the prose to deliver the emotional payoff. And it does deliver. Brooklyn chooses the narrative form of a much cheaper kind of book—“one woman, two countries, two men”—but that isn’t what it’s about; you’re not quite sure what it’s about until the last few pages, and then you can see how carefully the trap has been laid for you. I loved it. Will I wreck it? It’s perfectly possible, of course. It’s a very delicate piece, and Eilis is a watchful, still center. I won’t have to hack away at its complicated architecture, though, because it doesn’t have one, so maybe I have half a chance. By the time you read this, I should have started in on it; if you have a ten-year-old daughter with ambitions to be an actor, then she might as well start trying to acquire an Irish accent. In my experienceof the film business, we’ll be shooting sometime in 2020, if it hasn’t all collapsed by then.
    In a way, I read Live From New York , an oral history of Saturday Night Live , because of work, too. Earlier in the year I got an American agent, a lovely, smart woman whose every idea, suggestion, and request I’ve ignored, more or less since the moment we agreed she’d represent me. Anyway, she recommended Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s book, and my feeling was that if I’m not going to make her a penny, I could at least follow up on her book tips. And I’m pretty sure that if it had to be one or the other, money or successful recommendations, she’d go for the recommendations. That’s what makes her special.
    I read the book despite never having seen a single minute of Saturday Night Live , at least prior to Tina Fey’s turn as Sarah Palin in 2008. The show was never shown in the U.K., so I hadn’t a clue who any of these people were. Will Ferrell? Bill Murray? Adam Sandler? Eddie Murphy? John Belushi? Chris Rock? Dan Aykroyd? It’s sweet that you have your own TV stars over there. You’ve probably never heard of Pat Phoenix, either.
    When it’s done well, as it is here, then the oral history is pretty unbeatable as a nonfiction form—engrossing, light on its feet, the constant switching of voices a guarantee against dullness. Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk , George Plimpton’s Edie Sedgwick book, Studs Terkel’s Working … These are books that I hope to return to one day, when I’ve read everything else. Live From New York is probably just a little too long for someone unfamiliar with the show, but if you want to learn something about the crafts of writing and performing, then you’ll pick something up every few pages. I am still thinking about these words from Lorne Michaels:
    The amount of things that have to come together for something to be good is just staggering. And the fact that there’s anything good atall is just amazing. When you’re young, you assume that just knowing the difference between good and bad is enough: “I’ll just do good work, because I prefer it to bad work.”
    Michaels’s observation contains a terrible truth: you think, at a certain point in your life, that your impeccable taste will save you. As life goes on, you realize it’s a bit more complicated than that.
    While I was reading Live From New York , I realized that G. E. Smith, the show’s musical