The Drift of Years

Sunday Book Review - ‘Someone,’ by Alice McDermott

By LEAH HAGER COHEN

The New York Times - September 6, 2013

Over a decade ago, The New Yorker ran a short story I’ve never been able to forget. A wisp of a thing, barely more than twice the length of this review, it contains little action, less plot. It doesn’t seem to be about anything — except a whole life. We meet the unnamed protagonist as a child clearing ice-cream dishes from the family dinner table, surreptitiously licking the “creamy dregs” from each one. We glimpse her as a teenager necking on the couch, as a young wife reveling in the domestic sensuality of motherhood, as an older woman attending her husband’s deathbed, even then unable to keep from physical contact, “her open lips brushing . . . the surgical tape that secured the respirator in his mouth.” In the end, Alice McDermott’s “Enough” is a portrait of a woman filtered through a sensory lens, capturing the life of the body, replete with exultation and ache. Which means this is also a story about mortality.

Alice McDermott - Jamie & Andrew Schoenberger

SOMEONE By Alice McDermott

232 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. US$25.

Can it really have been seven years since we’ve had a novel from McDermott? Perhaps I found this surprising because so many passages from her last one, “After This,” remain etched in my mind, as sharp as those images from her New Yorker story. Such is the crisp purposefulness of McDermott’s prose. Her sentences know themselves so beautifully: what each has to deliver and how best to do it, within a modicum of space, with minimal fuss.

Consider the opening lines of her new novel, “Someone”: “Pegeen Chehab walked up from the subway in the evening light. Her good spring coat was powder blue; her shoes were black and covered the insteps of her long feet.” On the face of it, unremarkable. Almost pointedly unremarkable. To be sure, McDermott seems to take some satisfaction in ascribing this quality to herself. In an interview conducted while she was working on “Someone,” she observed that “novels about unremarkable women, especially those written by unremarkable women, seem a thing of the past. But that’s what the novel wanted to be. . . . It’s the contrarian in me, I’m afraid.” 

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