×
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

A lifetime relation

Last Updated 14 February 2015, 17:20 IST

The new offering by Alice McDermott, Someone, is a confirmation of why her work has been in book award lists since 1987. The winner of the American Book Award and the National Book Award in 1999 and finalist of several others over the years, including the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner, now gifts her readers this mellow tale of a young woman’s life starting in the 1920s. Marie’s story takes us through her childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and ends with her as an old woman.

The seven-year-old protagonist Marie, daughter of Irish immigrants to America, sits on the stoop of her house in Brooklyn waiting for her beloved father to return from work. The setting, evocatively described by the author, reads like a scene from a film with the sounds of kids playing in the street acting as background score while shy Marie sits expectantly.

The basic note underlying the novel is set in the opening chapter by young Pegeen Chahab of Syrian-Irish parentage who passes by the waiting Marie, chats her up while terming herself amadán (an Irish pejorative meaning ‘fool’) for her clumsiness. “But there’s always someone nice,” says Pegeen to little Marie who “always helps me up” — this forms the other recurrent note in Marie’s life. Pegeen is soon dead due to her amadán-ness but these two notes appear again and again in most characters at different stages of their life, acting as the foundation of the story. Metaphorical falling down and help from various sources, some unexpected, flows through the tale in a soft, subtle manner.

Marie grows up in this immigrant enclave which changes, over the years, from a bustling vibrant residental pocket of New York to a seedy, shabby and somewhat dangerous borough by the end of her story. The decades pass by gently despite the upheavals, traumas and events occurring in the lives of Marie, her family and other denizens of the area.

Alice McDermott’s pen demonstrates its finesse, taking the readers through the times gently; with tremors, yes, but no major cataclysms even if the events have been catastrophic for the characters.

The pace of the book is unhurried, yet it takes you through years rapidly in a non-jerky fashion. The neighbourhood comes alive for the reader who becomes a part of the greyness, the aromas, the stillness, the sounds and the filtered lights of the borough with its stooped houses and eclectic residents, thanks to the skilled use of words by the author. There is a seamless jumping back and forth between the past and the present, from a seven-year-old bespectacled Marie to a rebellious teenager facing her first heartbreak to an old woman with grown-up children. It suggests in a subtle manner the compulsions and emotions of the protagonists and what leads them to take certain decisions: whether it’s Marie, her mother, her brother Gabe, her first love Walter Hartnett or the playfulness and unstated tenderness of Tom. There are no black or white characters; all have a shade of grey, much like real people do. And that is what makes this book so genuine. Readers will be able to identify with the interactions of the characters. They are subtle with much left unsaid, yet understood by them; again, like it happens in our day-to-day conversations. The words are not contrived and give the characters a three-dimensional aspect; these people could be living down your street! At times, the words even give one a sense of déjà vu: ‘didn’t I say this just the other day’ kind of feeling.

McDermott’s descriptive ease is her forte. With simple words — no, you will not need the dictionary to read her — she brings alive the ambience and the people in her novel. Whether it’s the lace-doilied drawing room of an old white-haired, blue-eyed Irish woman or the brogue that surfaces in her occasionally, despite decades away from her homeland, or even the heated asphalt of the Brooklyn street on an oppressive summer day with trickling sweat and clingy dresses, her words act as a paintbrush and sound recorder combined, transporting the reader to the scenes that she depicts so painstakingly, yet effortlessly. The emotions expressed are simple yet complex in their underpinnings.

It’s a feel-good novel with no pomposity. It is the genteel tale of an ordinary person like you or me with everyday dramas, still gripping enough for the reader to not want to put it down. That is not easy and what marks a good writer; one who can convey the story in simple sentences with uncomplicated words. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, yes, I loved the book. And it’s not because the author shares her birthday with me.

ADVERTISEMENT
(Published 14 February 2015, 17:20 IST)

Follow us on

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT