If you have read Alice McDermott before, you don’t need me to tell you she is exceptional (1 National Book Award, 3 Pulitzer Prize nominations); her books always seem to make a quiet entrance but an echoing exit.
Alice McDermott’s newest book, Someone, is half Virginia Wolfe, half Betty Smith. The novel follows Marie Commeford, her growing up and aging. Foolish in love. Raising children. Watching her mother die. Like in her other novels, Alice McDermott walks the line with sentimentality. She seems to be telling the story you’ve heard before–girl born in poverty moving into the comfortable middle class by shear force of will–but this story is anything but predictable. The twists are unusually life-like. The characters cursed with physical ailments (a little Flannery O’Connor-esque) that only emphasize their shortcomings.
Marie Commeford is coming of age over and over again. Coming into the realization that we are all fools; our dreams rarely coincide with reality.
I sometimes wonder if all the faith and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don’t shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light. -10
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