Someone by Alice McDermottMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don't know what it is that makes me LOVE books that are just really well-told stories of everyday life. Indeed, this book boils down to various ordinary routines that make up Marie's life. Sometimes those routines are changed up just a bit and become the thing that defines us. An innocent swear word at the routine family gathering becomes the basis of the family nickname of pagan. Collecting a friend from her house where she is baking for her pregnant mother becomes the impetus of Marie's reticence to learn how to bake. There is nothing earth-shattering here. Yet the beautiful way that McDermott describes these moments makes the ordinary feel sublime. They feel authentic because we can see pieces of our own lives drawn in them; there is no need for suspension of belief or complicated plot twists. Throughout these works there are often motifs the author uses to underscore their observations or points and I enjoy discovering them. Although there may be several, McDermott uses light and shadows to emphasize the mood and to hint at the everyday revelations that we only see in retrospect and that what we see is not always how things are.
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"Never good to forget to remember," she said, "Always better to remember you forgot."
"Well, I don't want to learn," I said. "Once you learn to do it, you'll be expected to do it."
I sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to take my glasses off, fling them across the room. To tear the new hat from my heat and fling it, too. Put my hands to my scalp and peel off the homely face. Unbutton the dress, unbuckle the belt, remove the frail slip. I wanted to reach behind my neck and unhook the flesh from the bone, open it along the zipper of my spine, step out of my skin and fling it at the floor. Back shoulder stomach and breast. Trample it. Raise a fist to God for how He had shaped me in that first darkness: unlovely and unloved.
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 wswath of thin clothes 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.
Because the devil uses dirty words, Mrs. Fagin added, instructing me, her tiny finger held in the air, to make us believe that we're only the sum and substance of ugly things.
The ordinary, rushing world going on, closing up over happiness as readily as it moved to heal sorrow.
I shrugged, aware of, grateful for, the grace of this ordinary conversation.
...But it was also, I came to believe, the very lifelessness of the bodies that made them all somehow indistinguishable and anonymous.
...when there's a sudden death, everybody thinks about all the days before, the days that were a vigil, after all, a vigil everyone was living through but nobody knew it."
Of course, churches should have been the touchstone places of our lives, a pair of Catholics such as we were. But in truth it was the tiled corridors of these old urban hospitals that marked the real occasions of our life together.
