Someone: A Novel

An awesome novel about Marie in Brooklyn starting around the time of World War I and reaching into the 1960s or 70s. Many of the people Marie tells about die; and she works for a funeral parlor for a few years. Though this sounds like a boring premise for a story, Alice McDermott masterfully crafts a language of joy and grief.Marie has severe vision problems that worsen through her life; the world looks very different to her with her glasses off than when they are on. McDermott does a great job of using the recurring motif of light and shadow throughout the story to convey an authentic life. McDermott superbly uses both dialog and narrative to move the story forward.A primary theme of Someone is that time moves on forever swallowing up our joys and sorrows burying them in the past."The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, it its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief". (Page 80)And this lovely meditation on the meaning of marriage (Spoiler alert) "For one of at least, we knew, we were certain-this is how we saw the world-there would never again be loneliness in life. For Tom, as it turned out." (Page 173).This is a wonderful book; if I were to compare Alice McDermott to another novelist, it would be Richard Russo in the rich interpretation of normal lives.

This book is a soft, introspective delight. There are silences in this story, times when you find yourself thinking, right along with Marie, about what has happened and why. On the surface, the story is hers, and we follow her life in some detail. But I think you can argue it is about her interactions with and processing of death.Marie, following two events involving people close to her when she is a small child, learns early to see death as a lurking presence. Following her first job in a funeral home, she develops an ability to understand those who are suffering a loss, and to comfort them. That, coupled with her family's focus on her beloved brother, an other-worldy boy on the way to the priesthood, explains some of her attitudes. It certainly seems her bravado in the face of the danger more children might mean must come from her intimate relationship to death and the afterlife her brother's vocation takes as a given. Does she in fact save her brother at the end? Is she really able to call back the death of a loved one? Or is she just like most of us, whistling past the graveyard and bolstering her own courage with these beliefs? I don't think we know or are meant to. This book is less about what happens and more about one person's perceptions of what has happened. It is a beautifuly written story of a fairly ordinary person in which grim and painful events occur, and are folded into the life and lore of an Irish immigrant community with grace and acceptance.

Life has the capacity, even if we don't seek thrills and constant activity, to be hectic and stressful. Personal, professional and societal/cultural concerns can all add up to a cacophony of discord that can crowd out the accomplishments, the positive interactions, the planning for something better.Which is partly why fiction is so important today. It can put the reader in another world, in another viewpoint, in another situation. Often, just that ability to step out of the ongoing noise and think about something else can be restful. Sometimes it can even be invigorating.Reading Alice McDermott is downright peaceful. Charming Billy, a National Book Award winner, is the work of a powerful observer of the small moments in life that matter. Her latest novel, Someone, is not a wild rollercoaster ride of a read. Thankfully.Marie goes back and forth in time to recount vignettes of her family from her childhood to old age. As a child in between the two world wars in an Irish-American neighborhood of Brooklyn, Marie has bad eyesight, a beloved father who drinks, a mother who appears stern but is filled with love and a brother destined for the priesthood. She has a lifelong friend, Gerty, whose mother is expecting yet another child in middle age, and talks to a neighborhood teenager who laughs at her own clumsiness.The teenager, Pegeen, was born of parents with a lovely story -- a woman from Ireland and a man from Syria managed to find themselves in an American bakery and married. She's not a beautiful girl, she has a bit of the hunchback to her and always seems to be coming undone. She's always leaving things behind and calls herself "amadan" -- a fool.In the midst of her scraps, Pegeen, says, she's not alone:"But there's always someone nice," she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. "Someone always helps me up."After a first-love heartbreak, Marie and her older brother, Gabe, now a failed priest, walk for miles in the summer heat:"Who will love me?" I said. The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers. "Someone," he told me. "Someone will."And that's all this book is about -- someone. Marie lives a quiet life that makes no waves. She is there for others in small, quiet ways just as others are there for her. Other characters take on importance because they are noted, because they are always where they belong, such as blind Bill Corrigan. A young WWI veteran, his mother irons his white shirts and escorts him down to the street every day. They walk arm in arm as a couple would. Bill sits in a chair on the street and settles streetball arguments as a referee whose authority is not questioned.Bill does not perform other actions that make him the nexus of anything, yet he is one of the vital threads that hold the community and the story together.This is the quiet brilliance of McDermott's work. The characters weave in and out of the narrative as their lives go on. What was noted as it happened earlier is recalled in passing later, and the world remains connected. McDermott also is masterful at making the small moments count, because they are such a large part of life, as when young Marie is slipped an extra sugar cube by her father and she puts it in her evening tea:I listened (to her brother reciting poetry), my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, the desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger.Whenever "the sand of Syria" is mentioned again in the novel, I go back to that dining room table and the girl Marie was, because it says so much about the woman she became.And while he is not the focus, or the sole focus, of the novel, her brother Gabe is, like Marie, a character who in other hands would have a far more dramatic arc with huge episodes and long-winded speeches. McDermott's restraint in showing how life turned out for Gabe makes his journey all the more realistic and worthy of consideration.All the characters in McDermott's fiction have such lives. And so do people we know -- the ones who won't be memorialized in New York Times obits, who won't be the subject of biographies, unless we make them ourselves. Which is what one family does for a son killed in World War II:They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond and what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.Not remarkable at all, Florence, not remarkable at all. There should always be someone who knows.

Marie's narration begins in the 1920's when she is a child living in an apartment in an Irish-American enclave of Brooklyn. Her home consists of a rather stern mother, a kind but alcoholic father, and her studious, serious older brother Gabe. Marie's friends, the neighbourhood and her family situation come to life with some spare but rounded, atmospheric prose. Over the years, characters develop, as does Marie's experience of life. It is very welcome to read a book which isn't overly long or congested with detail, yet breathes and depicts convincing characters and lives. The essence of a human life is here in these pages, adolescent struggles, loss,work, love, the sense of not knowing what comes next, the intuitive wisdom that is wordless, poignant sometimes (but not depressing) though not without humour, and with a knowing gratitude for the important things. I enjoyed the quality of the writing.

In SOMEONE, many elements came together for me. The setting is Brooklyn in the 1920's - & beyond. The varied cast is largely Irish-American. A central character is one I cared about. Marie is both unremarkable in her rarity & impossible to forget. I'm a huge lover of American contemporary fiction & this little gem fulfilled all my expectations. Alice McDermott's prose is sensuous; it falls from her pen & onto the page in flashes of bright clarity. An intriguing, beautifully wrought story spanning one woman's eventful, ordinary life reminding us, there is no such thing. All our lives are extraordinary, memorable & of value. Highly recommended.

This is not a flashy novel but quietly tells the story of an Irish-American family from Brooklyn in the 1920s to today, focussing on Marie, her brother Gabe and parents. McDermott is subtle and sensitive and deftly covers a lot of ground in a slim book that is, I think, a masterpiece of psychological realism. Highly recommended.

Great book good author. The story is unique and interesting.

good