The opening of Alice McDermott's "After This":
Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks--the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt--felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves.
And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?--office memos? shopping lists? The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?
St. Patrick's Day is a fine time to read a McDermott novel. These novels tend to involve Irish-American people in pain, and they're weirdly comforting to me.
McDermott is a contrarian. If you were a writer, you might hear from an editor: Don't open with a gust of wind in Manhattan. That's not juicy material. But, in McDermott's hands, the wind becomes exciting: It causes a hem to "fly," it causes "banging," it "rushes and rattles." It's accompanied by "slivered shards of mad sunlight": Can't you recall a time when you found the sun so oppressive, you felt like you were in the company of a crazy person?
McDermott shows us something--she doesn't *tell* us--about her protagonist's sensibility. This woman--whoever she is--has poetic habits. A little wind causes her to think about corpses on battlefields--how their unfinished business, their letters and photos, whirl around like ghosts on the silent campus. Who thinks this way? Also, our protagonist seems to *identify* with the soldiers: She herself seems to be marching into battle, with scraps of paper "trailing and outrunning" her.
It's counterintuitive to imagine that scraps of paper on the street tell a story. It's counterintuitive--really--to *notice* scraps of paper on the street. But McDermott is a weirdo. She seems to be on a "different frequency" ....Her writing makes the reader want to pay attention to daily life. I'm eager to see what she does next.
Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks--the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt--felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves.
And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?--office memos? shopping lists? The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?
St. Patrick's Day is a fine time to read a McDermott novel. These novels tend to involve Irish-American people in pain, and they're weirdly comforting to me.
McDermott is a contrarian. If you were a writer, you might hear from an editor: Don't open with a gust of wind in Manhattan. That's not juicy material. But, in McDermott's hands, the wind becomes exciting: It causes a hem to "fly," it causes "banging," it "rushes and rattles." It's accompanied by "slivered shards of mad sunlight": Can't you recall a time when you found the sun so oppressive, you felt like you were in the company of a crazy person?
McDermott shows us something--she doesn't *tell* us--about her protagonist's sensibility. This woman--whoever she is--has poetic habits. A little wind causes her to think about corpses on battlefields--how their unfinished business, their letters and photos, whirl around like ghosts on the silent campus. Who thinks this way? Also, our protagonist seems to *identify* with the soldiers: She herself seems to be marching into battle, with scraps of paper "trailing and outrunning" her.
It's counterintuitive to imagine that scraps of paper on the street tell a story. It's counterintuitive--really--to *notice* scraps of paper on the street. But McDermott is a weirdo. She seems to be on a "different frequency" ....Her writing makes the reader want to pay attention to daily life. I'm eager to see what she does next.
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