My father appeared at the corner. Paused for his evening paper. Topcoat and hat to mark him as a clerk, not a laborer. I only raised my head above my knees when I saw him--although surely something, some sinewy energy, some delight, tensed and trembled itself through my thin back and shoulders as I gazed down the sloping street. The boys playing stickball parted once again for a passing car: it was the ebb and flow of their game. I turned away from them, raised a hand to the balustrade to get ready to spring. My father was a thin, slight man in a long coat. His step was quick and jaunty. He wore shoes with a high shine.
I waited until he was halfway toward home. And then I flew, across the sidewalk and into the air as he lifted me--the newspaper held tightly under his arm the only impediment, it seemed, to an ascent that I saw in my own imagination as equivalent, somehow, to the caps the boys had thrown into the air when the umpire made his call. I would not have been surprised to hear them cheer.
My father smelled, always, of fresh newsprint and cigarettes, of the alcohol in his faded cologne. I caught my chin on his buttons as he lowered me to the ground. A brief, painful scrape that upset my glasses and made my eyes water. I walked the last few paces home balanced on his shoes. We climbed the steps together and into the fragrant vestibule--fragrant with the onion odor of cooked dinners and the brownstone scent of old wood--and up the narrow stairs and into the apartment, where my mother was in the kitchen and my brother at the dining-room table with his books.
-Marie, the narrator of "Someone," is maybe in her eighties. She's looking back on a long life. It seems "normal," but even a normal life has its highlights: the closeted brother leaving the priesthood, the weird first encounter with sex, the neighbor who marries a man who turns out to be a woman. Because Marie isn't a titan or a jet-setter, her big memories tend to concern her father, her mother, her brother, or her husband. (Though there is some fun failed love and some work drama along the way.)
-One of the great pleasures of "Someone" is that it's so universal. You know what Marie is talking about. Sometimes, when I'm reading about spies or British serial killers, I struggle to relate. But who hasn't felt filial love, or struggled with a torpedoed relationship, or wondered about the frailties of human bodies? Reading "Someone," you get the sense that vast unexplored areas of your own life could be the stuff of literature. For example, I tend to think of my grandmother--who, like Marie, would have been very young in the thirties. I think of how emotionally-charged her kitchen seemed: how the menagerie of Lipton tea figurines seemed somehow sanctified, and how the meatballs were better than all others I'd had, and how it was a special honor to have your crayoned doodle taped up on the fridge.
-The encounter above, between first-grader Marie and her father, makes me think of the start of Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home." "Someone" is such a tour de force, because it shows how love can transform a scene. This is just a kid getting scooped up by her dad, but in the kid's mind, this is something akin to ball caps tossed in the air. In the kid's mind, there are cheering crowds. This is the stuff of "some sinewy energy, some delight, tensing and trembling itself through my thin back and shoulders." It's a standard end-of-workday reunion--but transformed. Love does that.
-A new paragraph signals a switch--from the fantasy of flight to the brass-tacks info about Dad's body. The "smell of fresh newspaper and cigarettes, and the alcohol of his faded cologne": By alluding to the cologne so quickly, McDermott is linking the father with alcohol. (Drink will be a big part of Dad's secret life, a thing he makes Marie complicit in; Marie is always aware of the trembling hand when Dad hasn't found a way to sneak a drink. And then another family secret is a big theme here: Gabe's homosexuality. This will drive him from the priesthood, and then lead to his breakdown: He is wrestling with himself, wondering whether he is a cruel or compassionate spirit, wondering whether he is worthy of love. Gabe tries to narrate some of this for Marie, in a veiled way, but she mistakes the point of the story entirely. Gabe gives signals--early on, and in any way he can--that all is not well in his head and heart, and then a real storm hits, and it's the climax of the book.)
-McDermott took something like seven years to write this novel, and so almost every detail seems to have major echoes elsewhere in the book. You might miss the way the "scrape" upsets Marie's glasses and makes her eyes water. But that's part of a larger discussion of blindness and sight--an obsession with eyes, woven throughout the book. ("All human eyes are beautiful.") Marie will again find herself momentarily blinded when her thuggish boyfriend dumps her; she will lose sight for a full ten days, on another occasion, and feel the terrible weight of not even knowing if you are alone in a room; she will observe how one of her own eyes does an occasional half-squint, and she will see how this drives her boyfriend crazy. It's not surprising that a novel so obsessed with vision is also a novel preoccupied with light: "The back of the apartment caught the morning light and the front the slow, orange hours of the afternoon." Even the very first sentence: "Pegeen walked up from the subway in the evening light." And: "The light grew brighter and the darkness fell away."
-All those eyes, all that light: McDermott's point seems to be this. Appreciate the mundane world. That's all. She pays close attention to the five senses. She finds beauty and drama in something as ordinary as bread-baking, or the stickball sounds coming from the boys at the end of the street.
P.S. The theme of impaired vision also makes me think of "Charming Billy." That was a book about how we never know the full story--how we're left to guess and to make inferences. The drama of inferential thinking, inaccurate thinking: That seems to be a major concern in "Someone" (all those moments of blurred or fully-impaired vision), just as it is a major concern in "Charming Billy."
I waited until he was halfway toward home. And then I flew, across the sidewalk and into the air as he lifted me--the newspaper held tightly under his arm the only impediment, it seemed, to an ascent that I saw in my own imagination as equivalent, somehow, to the caps the boys had thrown into the air when the umpire made his call. I would not have been surprised to hear them cheer.
My father smelled, always, of fresh newsprint and cigarettes, of the alcohol in his faded cologne. I caught my chin on his buttons as he lowered me to the ground. A brief, painful scrape that upset my glasses and made my eyes water. I walked the last few paces home balanced on his shoes. We climbed the steps together and into the fragrant vestibule--fragrant with the onion odor of cooked dinners and the brownstone scent of old wood--and up the narrow stairs and into the apartment, where my mother was in the kitchen and my brother at the dining-room table with his books.
-Marie, the narrator of "Someone," is maybe in her eighties. She's looking back on a long life. It seems "normal," but even a normal life has its highlights: the closeted brother leaving the priesthood, the weird first encounter with sex, the neighbor who marries a man who turns out to be a woman. Because Marie isn't a titan or a jet-setter, her big memories tend to concern her father, her mother, her brother, or her husband. (Though there is some fun failed love and some work drama along the way.)
-One of the great pleasures of "Someone" is that it's so universal. You know what Marie is talking about. Sometimes, when I'm reading about spies or British serial killers, I struggle to relate. But who hasn't felt filial love, or struggled with a torpedoed relationship, or wondered about the frailties of human bodies? Reading "Someone," you get the sense that vast unexplored areas of your own life could be the stuff of literature. For example, I tend to think of my grandmother--who, like Marie, would have been very young in the thirties. I think of how emotionally-charged her kitchen seemed: how the menagerie of Lipton tea figurines seemed somehow sanctified, and how the meatballs were better than all others I'd had, and how it was a special honor to have your crayoned doodle taped up on the fridge.
-The encounter above, between first-grader Marie and her father, makes me think of the start of Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home." "Someone" is such a tour de force, because it shows how love can transform a scene. This is just a kid getting scooped up by her dad, but in the kid's mind, this is something akin to ball caps tossed in the air. In the kid's mind, there are cheering crowds. This is the stuff of "some sinewy energy, some delight, tensing and trembling itself through my thin back and shoulders." It's a standard end-of-workday reunion--but transformed. Love does that.
-A new paragraph signals a switch--from the fantasy of flight to the brass-tacks info about Dad's body. The "smell of fresh newspaper and cigarettes, and the alcohol of his faded cologne": By alluding to the cologne so quickly, McDermott is linking the father with alcohol. (Drink will be a big part of Dad's secret life, a thing he makes Marie complicit in; Marie is always aware of the trembling hand when Dad hasn't found a way to sneak a drink. And then another family secret is a big theme here: Gabe's homosexuality. This will drive him from the priesthood, and then lead to his breakdown: He is wrestling with himself, wondering whether he is a cruel or compassionate spirit, wondering whether he is worthy of love. Gabe tries to narrate some of this for Marie, in a veiled way, but she mistakes the point of the story entirely. Gabe gives signals--early on, and in any way he can--that all is not well in his head and heart, and then a real storm hits, and it's the climax of the book.)
-McDermott took something like seven years to write this novel, and so almost every detail seems to have major echoes elsewhere in the book. You might miss the way the "scrape" upsets Marie's glasses and makes her eyes water. But that's part of a larger discussion of blindness and sight--an obsession with eyes, woven throughout the book. ("All human eyes are beautiful.") Marie will again find herself momentarily blinded when her thuggish boyfriend dumps her; she will lose sight for a full ten days, on another occasion, and feel the terrible weight of not even knowing if you are alone in a room; she will observe how one of her own eyes does an occasional half-squint, and she will see how this drives her boyfriend crazy. It's not surprising that a novel so obsessed with vision is also a novel preoccupied with light: "The back of the apartment caught the morning light and the front the slow, orange hours of the afternoon." Even the very first sentence: "Pegeen walked up from the subway in the evening light." And: "The light grew brighter and the darkness fell away."
-All those eyes, all that light: McDermott's point seems to be this. Appreciate the mundane world. That's all. She pays close attention to the five senses. She finds beauty and drama in something as ordinary as bread-baking, or the stickball sounds coming from the boys at the end of the street.
P.S. The theme of impaired vision also makes me think of "Charming Billy." That was a book about how we never know the full story--how we're left to guess and to make inferences. The drama of inferential thinking, inaccurate thinking: That seems to be a major concern in "Someone" (all those moments of blurred or fully-impaired vision), just as it is a major concern in "Charming Billy."
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