[title subtitle=”review: Anita Paddock”][/title]
By Alice McDermott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: $25
This novel is a masterpiece about ordinary people, told in a simple, yet extraordinary way by a brilliant novelist. Nominated for three Pulitzer prizes and the National Book Award winner for Charming Billy, Alice McDermott once again takes her readers to Brooklyn and its Irish Catholic neighborhoods. Set during the forties and fifties, it opens with Marie sitting on the stoop of her townhouse, waiting for her father to emerge from the subway after a day’s work. She is a shy seven-year-old with bad eyesight who whiles away this time of day by watching the neighborhood boys play stickball in the street.
Her mother is preparing supper in their small upstairs kitchen while her older brother, Gabe, is studying, already planning on joining the priesthood. In the street below are the scents of fresh baked bread carried by shoppers on their way home in the fading light and the sounds of the subway beneath their feet. This is home, this neighborhood of Catholics who attend the same schools, fast before Sunday mass, and hold the priests and nuns in high esteem.
It is also home to blind Bill Corrigan, who was gassed in World War I, and whose mother brings him down to the street to sit in a straight back chair to be the umpire for the stickball games. And there is Walter Hartnett, who wears a lift in one shoe because of a congenital defect, and who will one day break Marie’s heart when he marries a judge’s pretty blonde daughter with good eyesight.
As Marie grows older, she begins to wonder if she’ll ever marry, if anyone will ever love her. On a long walk through the neighborhood, her brother Gabe, who did become a priest, but left it soon after, tells her, “ Someone. Someone will.”
Marie finds a job working as a receptionist for the neighborhood undertaker, Mr. Fagin, and there she stays for thirteen years, becoming the person who consoles and assists during the wakes, comforting mourners in their grief. Upstairs, on the third floor, Mr. Fagin lives with his tiny old mother in an immaculate apartment filled with Irish lace and vases of rearranged funeral flowers. His mother greets Marie when she visits with a warm, “What’s going on downstairs?” During tea, Marie learns the ins and outs of the neighborhood’s present and past from the retired nuns who visit daily with Mrs. Fagin. She learns who drinks too much, who is a skirt-chaser, who keeps a tidy home. That there is a grace of a shared past.
It is the poignancy of the pronoun, someone, that propels this novel, as the word, no doubt, propels all of us who at one time or the other has wondered if we will ever find love.
