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Colm Tóibín

Reading and signing copies of Brooklyn at 7 p.m., May 16. R.J. Julia Independent Booksellers, 768 Boston Post Road, Madison. Free. (203) 245-3959, rjjulia.com.

Knowing thyself is the point of "Six Days on the Road," that classic trucker song from 1963. Really, it's true. All that country singer Dave Dudley wants to do is get home to his baby. So he blasts through speed zones, dodges weigh stations and avoids the state patrol. To get through the long night, he takes some little white pills. Now his "eyes are open wide."

So is his mind. The solitude, uppers and time on his hands lead inevitably to moments of self-revelation. As a man alone on the road, the last of America's rugged frontier, he could have a lot of women. He has that freedom — and that power — but he knows it can't be. He's not afraid his sin will find him out. He just knows his place. "I could never make believe it's all right." So he's going home. Six days away from baby is long enough.

Freedom to explore who you are, and who you will become over time, is inconceivable to Eilis Lacey, the young adult heroine of Colm Tóibín's charming, witty and unsentimental new novel, Brooklyn (Scribner, 272 pages, $25). Growing up in the small Irish town of Enniscorthy in the 1950s, she fully expects to follow in mother's footsteps — school, marriage, kids. Life for Eilis is easy to anticipate, like the mist rolling in every morning from the Irish Sea.

Amid the comfort of familiarity is the strain of constant change. Her father died years ago. Her older brothers decamped to Liverpool to find work in English factories. She and older sister Rose are the last to remain with her mother, who never recovered from her husband's death and nearly succumbs herself when the youngest boy leaves.

Rose, a glamorous soul in her early 30s who's an ace golfer, is the sole bread-winner. Eilis brings in some money, but it's only from working for Miss Kelly, the town's arch-bitch. She owns the popular grocery, and she freely and openly discriminates against less worthy folk, like handymen and shop clerks, to privilege Enniscorthy's landed and business elite.

Rose knows the score. So when a Catholic priest from America named Father Flood visits one day, and tells the family over dinner of all the opportunities that await a smart, pretty, hard-winning girl like Eilis in America, it's arranged that this daughter of Ireland will leave everything that's familiar to her for a strange new land called Brooklyn.

This is a quiet, charming novel written with a masterful hand about a girl struggling to understand her new emerging self in a new postwar world. Tóibín excels at teasing out the essence of Brooklyn — that it's a hash of cultural differences and a product of the everyday tensions that are worked out, because they have to be worked out to live peacefully with each other. Familiarity more often breeds contempt, but on occasion love is the result, as it is for Eilis, beginning after a fateful night at a neighborhood dance.

If you're expecting a coming-of-age story in which a young girl has to choose between two men of equal perfection — one an exotic blond Italian-American entrepreneur who hopes their children will become Dodgers fans, the other a salt-of-the-earth Irish lad as rock solid as the political establishment he represents — you won't be disappointed. There is a dramatic turn in the form of news from home that changes everything, but otherwise there are no narrative fireworks, no Sturm und Drang, that yield what would usually be the necessary moral clarity in such situations.

Though she longs for the familiar and the expected, Eilis' choice is neither of these things. Rather, it's the result of a secret, shy self coming into full bloom. Over time, she has the power to choose for herself what's good. And like Dave Dudley, she could never make believe that the alternative was all right. Her eyes, too, are now open wide. In her case, though, it's without those little white pills.