Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Alice McDermott’ category

Reading Writer – writers as mirrors

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I attended a workshop a few months ago conducted by the playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. Kwei-Armah is an unabashedly political writer with a social agenda and he spent a considerable amount of time discussing the idea that writers are the mirrors of society. I like this idea and agree with it. But I also think that if its true, it makes writing a very difficult exercise indeed.

I like the idea because so much of what I enjoy in fiction is having the world thrown back at me in a way I wouldn’t have formulated myself. I love it when a piece of fiction shows me something about the world that I instantly recognize as “true” but that I hadn’t managed to discover on my own, or understand in exactly the same way. Good fiction reveals. Good writers capture the play between the light and darkness of reflection.

It’s this tension that makes writing so difficult. How do we create something unique out of something that is essentially a revelation of things as they actually are? In this sense, good fiction creates something that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I don’t mean we have to recognize ourselves in each character we read, but often, it is only through a recognition of our shared humanity with a character that a story becomes meaningful.

From Birds of America, “People Like That Are the Only People Here”, Lorrie Moore: What words can be uttered? You turn just slightly and there it is: the death of your child. It is part symbol, part devil, and in your blind spot all along, until, if you are unlucky, it is upon you. Then it is a fierce little country abducting you; it holds you squarely inside itself like a cellar room – the best boundaries of you are the boundaries of it. Are there windows? Sometimes aren’t there windows?

From That Night, Alice McDermott: For after this, after the cars and the sudden spinning onto her lawn, the boys with their chains and the fight and the chilling sound of her boyfriend’s cry, after this, no small scenes could satisfy us, no muffled arguments, no dinner-at-eight celebrations, no sweet, damaged child, could make us believe we were living a vibrant life, that we had ever known anything about love.

From The Echo Maker, Richard Powers: What did it feel like to be Mark Schluter? To live in this town, work in a slaughterhouse, then have the world fracture from one moment to the next. The raw chaos, the absolute bewilderment of the Capgras state twisted Weber’s gut. To see the person closest to you in this world, and feel nothing. But that was the astonishment: nothing inside Mark felt changed. Improvising consciousness saw to that. Mark still felt familiar; only the world had gone strange. He needed his delusions, in order to close that gap. The self’s whole end was self-continuation.

From Occasion for Loving, Nadine Gordimer: He stretched himself out on the sofa, and when Tom finished his work he saw that he was asleep. His head was flung back on a raised arm behind his head. The fingers of the hand moved like tendrils in an effort against cramp that did not break through to consciousness; on the blank face of sleep traces of bewilderment and disgust were not quite erased round the mouth. Tom looked at him for a moment with the curiosity that is always aroused by the opportunity to contemplate suffering without having to respond to the sufferer, and then decided to leave him there, and turned out the light.

The narrators of each of these passages exposes something recognizable about the human condition. I’ve never had any first hand experience with Capgras syndrome yet Powers’s description of the splicing of the psyche after trauma feels horribly familiar, I’ve never experienced anything having to do with pediatric cancer but the desire for denial that Moore presents speaks to me because that is something that humans do – we deny, we rant and rave, we even tell jokes in the dark moments. These passages are all so affecting because they show us who we are, they reflect something particular and it becomes something shared.

These novels are constructed out of a web of these moments, groups of sentences put together by the narrator and wedged in between the dialogue and the action to ensure the novel functions on two levels at all times – The Echo Maker isn’t just about Mark Schluter’s car accident and his sister’s attempt to rehabilitate him, it is also a novel about us and how fragile our minds and identity really are. Nadine Gordimer isn’t just writing about a woman’s love affair with a black man in apartheid South Africa, she is also revealing how we negotiate social inequality in its myriad forms.

Alice McDermott – Child of My Heart

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Child of My Heart (2002) is the most sensual of the five McDermott books I have read in the past few months for the Reading the Author Challenge as well as a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story. That doesn’t make it disappointing, or in any way, ordinary. The story captures well those illusory moments of enchanting limbo between childhood and adulthood. 

Our narrator is Teresa – the daughter of middle class working parents, thrown into the high society world of wealthy Long Island as a child minder and pet sitter. The story is set during her fifteenth summer, a summer she spends looking after the young daughter of an older painter along with her own eight year old cousin. One of the trademarks of Teresa’s character is a nearly magical expertise with both children and animals. She is also beautiful. And conscious of both these qualities. The awareness of her gifts comes wrapped in the unshakeable confidence of a young girl eagerly looking to take her first steps in an adult world. 

The heart of the story centers on Teresa’s relationship with the artist father of her youngest charge, Flora, and the mysterious bruises that she discovers blooming across the body of her cousin, Daisy. In response to these two situations, Teresa’s behavior is sometimes surprising and her decisions curious. And as necessary for most coming-of-age stories, McDermott has not created an ordinary teenager but an overly mature one, an old soul. Something that at times does push the boundaries of verisimilitude. Yet, Teresa contains a healthy dose of everygirl and everywoman. And it is this mix of her exceptional qualities with her typical side that make her a character worth getting to know. 

One of the more poignant elements of the story is Daisy’s self-conscious decline. She is a sick little girl and gradually wakening to that possibility despite Teresa’s machinations to fairytale her into perfect happiness. This feature of the novel perfectly mirrors Teresa’s ambivalence about her movement away from childhood and its games. 

I wanted them banished, the stories, the songs, the foolish tales of children’s tragic premonitions. I wanted them scribbled over, torn up. Start over again. Draw a world where it simply doesn’t happen, a world of only color, no form. Out of my head and more to my liking: a kingdom by the sea, eternal summer, a brush of fairy wings and all dark things banished, age, cruelty, pain, poor dogs, dead cats, harried parents, lonely children, all the coming griefs, all the sentimental, maudlin tales fashioned out of the deaths of children. 

McDermott really is a master of finding the smaller moments, the minutiae of life, and mining their more complicated emotions. Child of My Heart spans only a few short weeks in Teresa’s life but it unearths what those weeks are to become to her entire life. 

Alice McDermott – Charming Billy

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Finished up my 4th Reading the Author Challenge book last night – Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy. McDermott came away with the National Book Award in 1998 for this quiet novel and it is considered one of her finest.  

My notes from the first time I read Charming Billy, sometime back in 2004, mention that I found the perspective jarring because while it was first person it was also omniscient. Having had more experience with her work now, I have come to appreciate McDermott’s ability to meld the two perspectives and think that it brings a richness, or maybe a better word for it is layering, to her stories. The narrator sweeps in and out of several story threads at once, reserving different levels of authority for each one. In many ways, the combination of threads work to reveal a larger narrative about who the narrator actually is – but this is done so slyly, so covertly, that it is only at the end you realize what all the storytelling has really been about. 

The novel begins with Billy Lynch’s death (the horrible and messy death of an alcoholic) and the necessary assembling of friends and family to grieve and remember him. They recreate the stories of Billy’s life, focusing on a part of his history that made him famous, the story of his falling in love with an Irish girl visiting in New York, of his asking her to marry him, then sending her the money so she could come back to him and finally, of his getting the news that she has died. This tragedy becomes the epicenter of the earthquake that Billy’s life will turn out to be – nights of drunken grieving, a childless marriage to a woman that everyone suspects knew she was second best, strained friendships and endless health problems.  

But the trick of the story is that the girl, Eva, never died. I am not giving anything away with this information – the narrator and her father Dennis (Billy’s cousin, but more like a best friend) have known the truth of Eva’s disappearance all along. In fact, the lie of her death was created by Dennis himself, a moment of panic when he realized he couldn’t tell love-struck Billy that Eva had taken his money and married another man in Ireland. 

What comes out of this scenario is a frank examination of the idea of fated experience, a look at how our memories are constructed around significant events that, if we have the courage to consider it, might not be that significant in the end. Dennis’ lie is wrapped up in his own desire for fairytale, Billy’s alcoholism is given a convenient excuse, our longing for ideal love is provided safe shelter. She writes: 

In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion.  

And just a few lines later: 

Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar’s courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more. 

Charming Billy is about so much more than Billy’s story. It is about the complexity and complicity of family life and marriage, a subject that McDermott brings to all of her work with a great deal of finesse. It is also about all the ways you can lose a loved one and how that loss may dissolve any previously firm foundations on which to base belief or hope. And in a subtle way, it is very much about understanding the balance of acceptance and resignation versus cherishing necessary ideals.  

I have two more McDermotts to go to finish up the challenge but I will take a small break and not start the next one until later in November. The next two are completely new to me and I’d like to let these last four fade a bit more before I start again.  

Alice McDermott – At Weddings and Wakes

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Alice McDermott’s At Wedding and Wakes is subtle, very subtle. And quiet. With a healthy dose of nostalgia and a certain reverence for the bewildering emotions of childhood. The story belongs to almost every member of the Irish-Catholic Dailey Family – a grandmother, four sisters (Agnes, Veronica, May and Lucy), May’s fiancé, Lucy’s husband and their three children. Most of the story comes filtered through the collective eyes of these three children, although McDermott jumps point of view all the time, a way to give life to each and every character, no matter how small.

Veronica, for example, begins as a missing element, the sister living in the shadows when the children visit their grandmother. At first it seems that McDermott is content to let her stay that way – separate, faceless, silent. Until suddenly in the middle of the book her own story stands up and says, Pay Attention. It is a beautiful moment and resonates through the rest of the book every time Veronica silently steps across the page.

There isn’t anything resembling a plot in this novel, no real forward action, no single story to latch onto – but this isn’t a drawback. This book is for careful, quiet reading. Paying attention to the prose is reward enough. In many ways At Weddings and Wakes reads like a series of vignettes. Although series isn’t the right word because the different stories don’t move in a straight line, instead they loosely circle the death of May – an event that is never realized in the book but whose repercussions are hinted at and projected through glimpses of May’s final days.

One of the more interesting things that McDermott does in this novel is take liberties with the timeline in ways that should be unsettling but which never actually disturb the surface of the story. She has a way of jumping quickly forward from a particular moment and creating a memory out of something actually happening. It’s like she explodes that very moment in time, filling it with longer-term emotions and transforming it into something more complex and complicated than it could ever be on its own. That she does this so seamlessly is a fantastic testament to her skill as our narrator.

So what is At Weddings and Wakes about? On one level it’s about the mysteries of family dynamic – how we work against each other, hurt each other and yet still manage to cultivate love and duty in that difficult environment. On another, it’s about falling in love – a boy with a vocation, an older couple with the idea of happiness, a young girl with the tragic story of her aunt’s late marriage and early death. And on even another, it’s about collective story telling – the narratives and threads of existence that we pull and weave together to create who we are and how we want to remember our life.

At Weddings and Wakes was published in 1992. It is Alice McDermott’s third novel.

Next in line for my Reading the Author Challenge is McDermott’s Charming Billy which won the National Book Award in 1998.

Alice McDermott – That Night

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There is a lot of important and provocative fiction out there; in the last two years alone there have been numerous BIG books. What I mean by that are the books that openly tackle huge questions about morality or the future, about issues relating to theology, philosophy, good and evil. While I do love fiction that takes on those kinds of challenges, I also have an immense respect for the writer that takes a quieter story – a tale of love and madness, of ordinary heartbreak and modest triumph – and writes it honestly and beautifully.  

The actual story behind Alice McDermott’s novel That Night is nothing extraordinary – teenage love, life lessons learned early…but the careful way McDermott works this simple narrative manages to create a startlingly rich world peopled by a sympathetic cast of characters with a lot to say about life. The entire novel centers on a single event in the life of the narrator – a summer evening of her youth when a street fight broke out between some teenage kids and the neighborhood fathers.  

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. 

The voice McDermott sets up here is just wonderful. The narrator looks back on the event with a keen nostalgia and a careful eye on everyone involved. And she continues to move in and around the event, telling how it came about and how it was resolved, with this same unique narrative access. In this way, she creates a microcosm of desires and disappointments for her entire neighborhood from the shared history of this event – an ingenious trick that adds a subtle weight to the entire story and infuses even the smallest action with deeper meaning.  

But now as she watched her cousin’s husband turning casually and only a little stiffly to see where the other two children had gone, the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

And so it happens that wedged inside the simple story of a teenage romance gone awry is a cautious exploration of love and how it works, how it comes into being and in what shape, how important it can seem, and how sometimes it must be given up in the process of growing up.  

That Night is McDermott’s second novel, published in 1987 and it went on to become a finalist for The Pulitzer, the Pen/Faulkner and the National Book Award.

Alice McDermott – A Bigamist's Daughter

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Reading an author’s first novel is always an interesting experience. Especially because in most cases I’ve already read a later work so my basis for evaluation seems a little unfair. That’s not to say that all first novels come out lacking in comparison to an author’s later works (in fact, sometimes it’s the reverse) but sometimes it is clear that the writer is still working through the questions of style or thematic project when the first novel is published. And really this makes sense because writing careers develop over a long time, have ups and downs, big triumphs along with mediocre successes, just like any other profession. Still, I enjoy reading first novels because I can get the sense I’m experiencing a real time development of the writer’s skills and confidence. 

Such it was with Alice McDermott’s A Bigamist’s Daughter. Now, I went into this reading with certain preconceptions about the kind of writer that McDermott is and so it was relatively fun to see how those presumptions held up. I’ve always considered McDermott the most non-flashy of American novelists – someone who writes subtly and tactfully about sex, who tackles domestic (I’m using this word in a positive way) and intimate themes about family and relationships with great insight. Well, to my surprise, The Bigamist’s Daughter is big on fairly explicit sex and it deals with what I would consider the rather provocative subject of vanity publishing. I say provocative because I think it was really ballsy of her to write so scornfully of vanity publishing in her first book. A daring or ingratiating literary feat. 

All that aside, McDermott’s fine touch is unmistakable in this early work. Here is the basic story: 25 year-old Elizabeth is an editor at a NYC vanity press. One afternoon a client comes in with a book about a bigamist. She goes through her usual schpiel, telling him how great it is, pretending she’s actually read it. The fact of the matter is, as long as he’s willing to pay, he’ll get his book. But Elizabeth and the writer end up in a sexual relationship and here is where the story takes a few surprising turns. As it turns out, Elizabeth‘s father kept another family and she’s living out the legacy of his duplicity – in her own romantic life and with her relationship with her mother.  

I nearly got the sense that there were two writers vying for territory in this book – one who wanted to write a chick-lit-esque satire on the life and amorous escapades of a young NYC editor and one who was really interested in exploring the painful territory of a parent’s influence on their children, the aftertaste of a strict religious upbringing as well as the pitfalls and victories of feminism. The first author was primarily concerned with creating a new kind of heroine, smart, tough and vulnerable all in one. The second author wanted to investigate the boundaries of fiction and how we self-narrate our successes and failures. Because of her skill, I think McDermott pulls off this combination but there were moments when I felt like I could see the seams.  

At least for me, the most satisfying part of reading McDermott will always be her writing. The startling little moments of intuition or exposure: 

She held herself before me rather delicately, as if her center were made of fragile glass. It made me feel childish, or fat, clumsy – a woman without a lover facing a woman with one. I glimpsed, for a moment, what Ward must have found so fascinating and tragic about her: that odd and delicate core, full of secrets. 

It occurs to her that every great realization given up, spoken, placed in another’s clumsy hands is, at heart, silly; every message from the grave a stale sermon or a slick song; every fiction, with all its attempts at sense and order, climax and resolution, words that mean something and change everything, laughable. Terribly laughable. Merely an excuse for fear, for laziness, for bad luck.  

Lovely, isn’t it? And her writing is filled with these keenly perceived moments.  

My next book will be That Night, published in 1987, five years after A Bigamist’s Daughter. I’ve already read That Night and loved it, so I’m really looking forward to this re-read.