Liars and Saints

  One gift of Alice McDermott's is to invent characters who are both weird and recognizable; you feel you've met these people. Theresa, a tenth grader on Long Island, is semi-aware that her little cousin might be dying. But Theresa is in a kind of hormonal haze--and the death of a child is too much to think about--so Theresa lies to herself. At the same time, she is drawn to an elderly local artist whose work may or may not be "immortal." It's interesting--and scary--to feel that you have power over a Great Man. Theresa starts showing off around the artist; she shares her thoughts about Shakespeare (and about his villain Macbeth). Theresa's parents have moved to Long Island, to a groundskeeper's cottage, because they think that Theresa's proximity to wealthy people is a good thing. They encourage her to mingle with rich neighbors; at the same time, they feel wary around her, because they know she will not remain close to home. (In this way, McDermott i...

 A personal essay should be iconoclastic. "Against Love." "Against Nature." If the essay just wants to affirm "received truth," it's going to be boring, like a bad watercolor on a coffee mug in an airport gift shop. Alice McDermott knows the rules, so she opens her essay by deflating Emerson. She suggests that, when Emerson told Whitman, "I greet you at the start of a long career," he was being silly. There is no "start" to a writer's career. A writer does not "make progress" -- everyday is square one. Every laptop screen can be a source of "rookie anxiety." McDermott has a talent for surprise. She next tells a tale about having been nominated for a National Book Award for "That Night." There was a sense of calm in the room, because everyone *knew* the prize would go to Toni Morrison for "Beloved."  The winner's name was called. It was an obscure novelist -- for a book that is (now) ut...

  "After This" is a novel about trauma. Sources of trauma--for men and women. John Keane fights in World War II; on a bad day, he finds himself holding a dying young man. The man--Jacob--is a stranger. Keane returns to New York--having lost three toes--and names his own son Jacob. When the son dies in Vietnam, John represses his grief. A useful strategy--until it isn't useful anymore. In this strange and moving story, John has a "foil"--his other son, Michael. Michael is the opposite of Jacob--impetuous, loud. As a child, Michael finds himself in his family's car during a windstorm--the entire family has bolted from the beach, and the adults are unprepared. As everyone eats sandwiches, Michael realizes that he could easily cause chaos. He just needs to roll down one window of the car. The storm will send all the paperware--the cups, plates, napkins--flying through the air. As Michael grows older, he is consistently an irritant for John. (This is because Mich...

 Alice McDermott says that prose is better than filmmaking--for a specific reason. Films give you sight and sound, but prose can give you (additionally) smell, taste, and touch. In her Pulitzer finalist novel, "After This," McDermott seems to wave her middle finger at Martin Scorsese et al. She includes the word "felt" three times in her opening paragraph. "Felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit, felt the wind rush up her cuffs." A windy day in New York City. Paper detritus flies everywhere, and the protagonist thinks of battlefields. Even armies are surrounded by flying candy wrappers, scraps of letters. After everyone has left, torn papers fly around and above and beside the corpses. This strange thought lets us know that we're (probably) reading a novel about Vietnam; the war hasn't happened to the protagonist yet, but Alice McDermott does know about the war, and she is winking at us. The other extraordinary feature is the synt...

 To me, St. Patrick's Day is mainly about storytelling. I don't know if Ireland is disproportionately "good" at writing, but consider the names: Edna O'Brien, Synge, Mark O'Connell, James Joyce, Colm Toibin, Yeats, Sean O'Casey, Brian Friel, Claire Keegan, William Trevor, Colin Barrett, Sharon Horgan, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Frank McCourt, Seamus Heaney, Sally Rooney, Brian Moore. This seems abnormal. My kids and I read "Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland," by Tomie dePaola. We have read it many times. DePaola understands that a good story is about a character, not a message. And Patrick has a good story. He is captured from Britain and sold into slavery in Ireland. Alone, he talks to God incessantly for six years. Given a chance to return to Britain, he "seduces" a group of hounds, so that they will force their master to create a Patrick-sized vacancy on his ship. But, then, Patrick is restless in Br...

  It's hard to read an Alice McDermott book--if little kids are in your house--because her plots jump around and jump backwards, and the cast of characters isn't small. If you're reading a murder mystery, you have the template in your head, and you can find your footing even if one or two pages have skipped past you. "Absolution" is about a woman in the early sixties who has received an education. She is smart, but she can also be foolish; she lets friends think that her father is a high school teacher, when, in fact, "works at a school" means "sweeps the hallways." (The sin of omission becomes a problem, later on.) The narrator marries a guy who assists the CIA; soon enough, the newlyweds find themselves in Vietnam. The narrator has one great wish--to start a family--and her efforts lead to folly. Her catastrophic miscalculations cause her to lie even now, in 2023, because she can't quite accept what a mess she once was. McDermott's na...

 Alice McDermott could be the greatest living storyteller in America, though she doesn't take on the flashy subjects (Marilyn Monroe, Dahmer, Chappaquiddick) that seem to speak to Joyce Carol Oates. McDermott's career is legendary. The second novel was a Pulitzer finalist; the third was a Pulitzer finalist. The fourth won the National Book Award, beating Tom Wolfe's buzzy "A Man in Full." Another Pulitzer finalist followed. A late-career novel almost won a (second) National Book Award. The most recent novel won the Prix Femina etranger. McDermott doesn't feel optimistic about literary fiction. She seems to think that novel-writing will become an example of "traditional folk art," like bagpipe-playing. She sees serial killers taking over all fictional terrain; she sees fiction writers relying strictly on sight and sound, as if already envisioning future movie scripts. Well? You might as well be the greatest bagpipe-player you can be, if you have that ...

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands. Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit pants, with baseball bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in their rush to protect her: the good and the bad--the black-jacketed boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes--startled for that one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of his call. This is serious, my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This is insane. I remember only that my ten-year-old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all. Sheryl was her name, but he cried, "Sherry," drawing ...

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 lette...

Pelecanos: "The Man who Came Uptown." Oh My God. I'm obsessed. Nora Ephron once described a great reading experience as "the rapture of the deep." That applies here--to the new novel by George Pelecanos. Mr. Pelecanos has been called "America's coolest writer," and he is a particular favorite of Dennis Lehane. People know him more for TV than for novels. He has worked on "The Deuce," "Bosch," "The Wire," and (likely) others. TV is great, but there are some things only printed literature can do. Pelecanos knows this. A smart work of prose engages you in ways TV can't; you become a co-creator of the story; you fill in blanks, make inferences, complete the canvas. Your mind melds with the characters--in a way unique to fiction. Good fiction. Pelecanos knows this. The new GP book--"The Man who Came Uptown"--is about, among many other things, the pleasures of reading. It's a thriller about reading. S...

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 he...

I'm headed to Greece tomorrow night! One of the great, and sometimes maddening, things about travel is planning a reading list. I put more thought into this than into clothing, sightseeing. In Jack Viertel's "Secret Life of the American Musical," Viertel admits he is not an ideal traveler, because he just thinks about musicals while he is wandering through ruins. So, for example, he spent his own Greece trip contemplating "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." (That's when he knew he needed to write a book about musicals. And maybe his trip was to Rome, not Greece. See! I'm so deeply aware of geography and history!) I know already that I will spend a fair amount of my Athens time pondering Disney's "Hercules." Specifically: Did anyone acknowledge Disney was clearly ripping off Howard Ashman's gospel trio from "Little Shop of Horrors"? Would the gospel chorus, in "Hercules," have any chance of suc...

Maeve sat in front of this window, at the head of the table. She wore a navy-blue dress with long, slim sleeves and a round neckline, and anyone in the room who had not thought it earlier thought now--perhaps inspired by the perfect simplicity of what she wore--that there was a kind of beauty in her ordinary looks, in her plainness. Or, if they didn't think to call it beauty, they said courage--more appropriate to the occasion and the day--not meaning necessarily her new-widow's courage (with its attendant new-widow's cliches: bearing up, holding on, doing well), but the courage to look out onto life from a face as plain as butter: pale, downy skin and bland blue eyes, faded brown hair cut short as a nun's and dimmed with gray. Only a touch of powder and of lipstick, only a wedding band and a small pearl ring for adornment. Of course, they'd thought her courageous all along (most of them, anyway, or--most likely--all but my father), living with Billy as she did; b...

February 3 was a dark and dank day altogether: cold spitting rain in the morning and the low, steel-gray sky the rest of the afternoon. At four, Jim convinced his wife to go out to do her shopping before full darkness fell. He closed the door on her with a gentle wave. His hair was thinning and he was missing a canine on the right side, but he was nevertheless a handsome man who, at thirty-two, might still have passed for twenty. Heavy brows and deep-set, dark-lashed eyes that had been making women catch their breath since he was sixteen. Even if he had grown bald and toothless, as he seemed fated to do, the eyes would have served him long into old age. His overcoat was on the hall tree beside the door. He lifted it and rolled it lengthwise against his thighs. Then he fitted it over the threshold, tucking the cloth of the sleeves and the hem as well as he could into the space beneath the door. Theirs was a railroad flat: kitchen in the back, dining room, living room, bedroom in the...