Genres
Collection
Publication
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2013), Edition: 1, 240 pages
Description
"The story of a Brooklyn-born woman's life - her family, her neighborhood, her daily trials and triumphs - from childhood to old age"--Provided by the publisher.
Media reviews
There are many reasons to write a novel.
One — maybe the best — is to bear compassionate witness to what it is to be alive, in this place, this time. This kind of novel is necessary to us. We need to know about other lives: This kind of knowledge expands our understanding, it enlarges our
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souls. There are differences between us, but there are things we share. Fear and vulnerability, joy and passion, the capacity for love and pain and grief: Those are common to us all. Those are the things that great novelists explore. And it’s this exploration, made with tenderness, wisdom and caritas, that’s at the heart of Alice McDermott’s masterpiece. Show Less
Each slide, each scene, from the ostensibly inconsequential to the clearly momentous, is illuminated with equal care. The effect on the reader is of sitting alongside the narrator, sharing the task of sifting the salvaged fragments of her life, watching her puzzle over, rearrange and reconsider
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them — and at last, but without any particular urgency or certitude, tilting herself in the direction of finally discerning their significance.
This is a quiet business, but it’s the sense-making we all engage in, the narrative work that allows us to construct a coherent framework for our everyday existence. It’s also a serious business, the essential work of an examined life. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member bookchickdi
No one writes about the Irish American experience better than Alice McDermott. Her National Book Award winning novel, Charming Billy, is the perfect example of that.
Her latest novel, Someone, tells the story of Marie, an ordinary Irish American girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Marie waits
Someone is all about an ordinary life- Marie's life. She goes to Catholic school, has a good friend Gertie, and a brother Gabe who is studying for the priesthood. The book goes back and forth in time, so we see the entirety of Marie's life- childhood, young adulthood, marriage, motherhood, sickness, health, births, deaths, growing old.
One thing that makes Marie stand out is that she has a problem with her eye. It affects not only her vision, but her outward appearance as well. When she finally gets a boyfriend, she feels elated. That balloon is burst when he dumps her for a woman who is prettier and comes from a wealthier family.
The title of the book comes from an exchange she has with her brother over this heartbreak. He tells her that the world is filled with cruelty and when she asks Gabe "Who will love me?", and he says "Someone-someone will."
And someone does. She meets Tom, who was abandoned by his vaudeville parents and nearly became an orphan train boy until a nun sent him to live with her widowed sister who just lost her son in a drowning. They build a life and a family together.
McDermott fills her beautiful novel with quiet moments of life- a mother brushing lint off the jacket of her son in his coffin, waiting to be picked up by family members at the airport, a baby sleeping warmly on his mother's shoulder.
Her language is gorgeous too. She speaks of aging as "a precarious ledge life carried you to, the ledge you lived on when you were an old woman alone, four good children or no." Of her husband, Marie said "he had the kind of face you wanted to put your palm to, like a child's."
After reading Someone, it would hard to pass by a person on the street and not wonder what his life story is. Everyone has a story and Marie was lucky enough to have Alice McDermott conjure up hers. And I was lucky enough to read it. I put Someone on my list of Most Compelling Reads of 2013.
Her latest novel, Someone, tells the story of Marie, an ordinary Irish American girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Marie waits
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on her stoop everyday for her beloved father to come home from work, watching the activity on the block- the boys playing stickball, Billy Corrigan, blinded from the war, umpiring the game, and the men and women walking home from the subway.Someone is all about an ordinary life- Marie's life. She goes to Catholic school, has a good friend Gertie, and a brother Gabe who is studying for the priesthood. The book goes back and forth in time, so we see the entirety of Marie's life- childhood, young adulthood, marriage, motherhood, sickness, health, births, deaths, growing old.
One thing that makes Marie stand out is that she has a problem with her eye. It affects not only her vision, but her outward appearance as well. When she finally gets a boyfriend, she feels elated. That balloon is burst when he dumps her for a woman who is prettier and comes from a wealthier family.
The title of the book comes from an exchange she has with her brother over this heartbreak. He tells her that the world is filled with cruelty and when she asks Gabe "Who will love me?", and he says "Someone-someone will."
And someone does. She meets Tom, who was abandoned by his vaudeville parents and nearly became an orphan train boy until a nun sent him to live with her widowed sister who just lost her son in a drowning. They build a life and a family together.
McDermott fills her beautiful novel with quiet moments of life- a mother brushing lint off the jacket of her son in his coffin, waiting to be picked up by family members at the airport, a baby sleeping warmly on his mother's shoulder.
Her language is gorgeous too. She speaks of aging as "a precarious ledge life carried you to, the ledge you lived on when you were an old woman alone, four good children or no." Of her husband, Marie said "he had the kind of face you wanted to put your palm to, like a child's."
After reading Someone, it would hard to pass by a person on the street and not wonder what his life story is. Everyone has a story and Marie was lucky enough to have Alice McDermott conjure up hers. And I was lucky enough to read it. I put Someone on my list of Most Compelling Reads of 2013.
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LibraryThing member cherybear
Don't hate me, McDermott lovers. I've tried her before, and after reading about this new book (and award winner), I thought I'd try again. She writes well, and I don't mind that it isn't action-packed. I do like that she examines relationships and feelings. I don't know why we don't quite hit it
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off. The ending was a bit abrupt for me--actually, I'll say very abrupt. I was thinking, things are just getting interesting. . . and then, "The End." But I think that's her style, and that's fine. Not every book I read can be the best one this year! Show Less
LibraryThing member danieljayfriedman
Not a word too many, nor a word too few. Not a word too soon or too late. Not a word out of place. A lovely book, elegantly written. Published a year later, Alice McDermott's Someone would be a fitting candidate for the newly expanded Man Booker Prize.
LibraryThing member tututhefirst
Suffice it to say, this lady can take an absolutely ordinary woman, put her in a dull and lackluster setting, throw in a handful of nondescript characters and spin pure gold as the story of her life. Somewhat slow starting, but at only 231 pages, definitely worth the time spent. It's absolutely
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mesmerizing, and difficult to review. The whole time I was reading it, I kept waiting for something exciting to happen, and then suddenly had that "AHA" moment when I realized that the excitement comes from the blessings of the ordinary. McDermott certainly deserved a National Book award for this one. Short, sparse, spectacular. Show Less
LibraryThing member etxgardener
National Book Award winner, Alice McDermott returns to the novel after an absence of seven years with a touchingly brilliant story of one woman's life in mid-century America.
We first meet Marie Commeford as a young child sitting on the stoop of her working class Brooklyn apartment in the late
As the years pass her story is told episodically. Children are born, neighbors die, her first boyfriend turns out to be casually cruel, and her brother becomes a priest only to abandon both his vocation and his faith. The neighborhood changes too - becoming more seedy as the years go by.
In Marie's telling of her story, everything is connected. Her first boyfriend's rejection leads her to a job as the local funeral director's "consoling angel," and her brother's rejection of the priesthood leads her to the man she will marry.
There are no huge, earth-shaking events here, just the the lives of a normal hardworking family. But in the telling of the story McDermott reveals a universality in her characters. Each has their dreams and each in their own way is blinded by the demands of life and love. This is a wonderful book & I hope the author doesn't wait another seven years for her next one.
We first meet Marie Commeford as a young child sitting on the stoop of her working class Brooklyn apartment in the late
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1920's waiting for her father to return from work. As she waits, the neighborhood unfolds around her: boys playing ball in the street, nuns walking by and the smells of various dinners cooking wafting through the air.As the years pass her story is told episodically. Children are born, neighbors die, her first boyfriend turns out to be casually cruel, and her brother becomes a priest only to abandon both his vocation and his faith. The neighborhood changes too - becoming more seedy as the years go by.
In Marie's telling of her story, everything is connected. Her first boyfriend's rejection leads her to a job as the local funeral director's "consoling angel," and her brother's rejection of the priesthood leads her to the man she will marry.
There are no huge, earth-shaking events here, just the the lives of a normal hardworking family. But in the telling of the story McDermott reveals a universality in her characters. Each has their dreams and each in their own way is blinded by the demands of life and love. This is a wonderful book & I hope the author doesn't wait another seven years for her next one.
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LibraryThing member Perednia
Life has the capacity, even if we don't seek thrills and constant activity, to be hectic and stressful. Personal, professional and societal/cultural concerns can all add up to a cacophony of discord that can crowd out the accomplishments, the positive interactions, the planning for something
Which is partly why fiction is so important today. It can put the reader in another world, in another viewpoint, in another situation. Often, just that ability to step out of the ongoing noise and think about something else can be restful. Sometimes it can even be invigorating.
Reading Alice McDermott is downright peaceful. Charming Billy, a National Book Award winner, is the work of a powerful observer of the small moments in life that matter. Her latest novel, Someone, is not a wild rollercoaster ride of a read. Thankfully.
Marie goes back and forth in time to recount vignettes of her family from her childhood to old age. As a child in between the two world wars in an Irish-American neighborhood of Brooklyn, Marie has bad eyesight, a beloved father who drinks, a mother who appears stern but is filled with love and a brother destined for the priesthood. She has a lifelong friend, Gerty, whose mother is expecting yet another child in middle age, and talks to a neighborhood teenager who laughs at her own clumsiness.
The teenager, Pegeen, was born of parents with a lovely story -- a woman from Ireland and a man from Syria managed to find themselves in an American bakery and married. She's not a beautiful girl, she has a bit of the hunchback to her and always seems to be coming undone. She's always leaving things behind and calls herself "amadan" -- a fool.
In the midst of her scraps, Pegeen, says, she's not alone:
"But there's always someone nice," she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. "Someone always helps me up."
After a first-love heartbreak, Marie and her older brother, Gabe, now a failed priest, walk for miles in the summer heat:
"Who will love me?" I said. The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers. "Someone," he told me. "Someone will."
And that's all this book is about -- someone. Marie lives a quiet life that makes no waves. She is there for others in small, quiet ways just as others are there for her. Other characters take on importance because they are noted, because they are always where they belong, such as blind Bill Corrigan. A young WWI veteran, his mother irons his white shirts and escorts him down to the street every day. They walk arm in arm as a couple would. Bill sits in a chair on the street and settles streetball arguments as a referee whose authority is not questioned.
Bill does not perform other actions that make him the nexus of anything, yet he is one of the vital threads that hold the community and the story together.
This is the quiet brilliance of McDermott's work. The characters weave in and out of the narrative as their lives go on. What was noted as it happened earlier is recalled in passing later, and the world remains connected. McDermott also is masterful at making the small moments count, because they are such a large part of life, as when young Marie is slipped an extra sugar cube by her father and she puts it in her evening tea:
I listened (to her brother reciting poetry), my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, the desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger.
Whenever "the sand of Syria" is mentioned again in the novel, I go back to that dining room table and the girl Marie was, because it says so much about the woman she became.
And while he is not the focus, or the sole focus, of the novel, her brother Gabe is, like Marie, a character who in other hands would have a far more dramatic arc with huge episodes and long-winded speeches. McDermott's restraint in showing how life turned out for Gabe makes his journey all the more realistic and worthy of consideration.
All the characters in McDermott's fiction have such lives. And so do people we know -- the ones who won't be memorialized in New York Times obits, who won't be the subject of biographies, unless we make them ourselves. Which is what one family does for a son killed in World War II:
They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond andd what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.
Not remarkable at all, Florence, not remarkable at all. There should always be someone who knows.
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better.Which is partly why fiction is so important today. It can put the reader in another world, in another viewpoint, in another situation. Often, just that ability to step out of the ongoing noise and think about something else can be restful. Sometimes it can even be invigorating.
Reading Alice McDermott is downright peaceful. Charming Billy, a National Book Award winner, is the work of a powerful observer of the small moments in life that matter. Her latest novel, Someone, is not a wild rollercoaster ride of a read. Thankfully.
Marie goes back and forth in time to recount vignettes of her family from her childhood to old age. As a child in between the two world wars in an Irish-American neighborhood of Brooklyn, Marie has bad eyesight, a beloved father who drinks, a mother who appears stern but is filled with love and a brother destined for the priesthood. She has a lifelong friend, Gerty, whose mother is expecting yet another child in middle age, and talks to a neighborhood teenager who laughs at her own clumsiness.
The teenager, Pegeen, was born of parents with a lovely story -- a woman from Ireland and a man from Syria managed to find themselves in an American bakery and married. She's not a beautiful girl, she has a bit of the hunchback to her and always seems to be coming undone. She's always leaving things behind and calls herself "amadan" -- a fool.
In the midst of her scraps, Pegeen, says, she's not alone:
"But there's always someone nice," she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. "Someone always helps me up."
After a first-love heartbreak, Marie and her older brother, Gabe, now a failed priest, walk for miles in the summer heat:
"Who will love me?" I said. The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers. "Someone," he told me. "Someone will."
And that's all this book is about -- someone. Marie lives a quiet life that makes no waves. She is there for others in small, quiet ways just as others are there for her. Other characters take on importance because they are noted, because they are always where they belong, such as blind Bill Corrigan. A young WWI veteran, his mother irons his white shirts and escorts him down to the street every day. They walk arm in arm as a couple would. Bill sits in a chair on the street and settles streetball arguments as a referee whose authority is not questioned.
Bill does not perform other actions that make him the nexus of anything, yet he is one of the vital threads that hold the community and the story together.
This is the quiet brilliance of McDermott's work. The characters weave in and out of the narrative as their lives go on. What was noted as it happened earlier is recalled in passing later, and the world remains connected. McDermott also is masterful at making the small moments count, because they are such a large part of life, as when young Marie is slipped an extra sugar cube by her father and she puts it in her evening tea:
I listened (to her brother reciting poetry), my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, the desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger.
Whenever "the sand of Syria" is mentioned again in the novel, I go back to that dining room table and the girl Marie was, because it says so much about the woman she became.
And while he is not the focus, or the sole focus, of the novel, her brother Gabe is, like Marie, a character who in other hands would have a far more dramatic arc with huge episodes and long-winded speeches. McDermott's restraint in showing how life turned out for Gabe makes his journey all the more realistic and worthy of consideration.
All the characters in McDermott's fiction have such lives. And so do people we know -- the ones who won't be memorialized in New York Times obits, who won't be the subject of biographies, unless we make them ourselves. Which is what one family does for a son killed in World War II:
They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond andd what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.
Not remarkable at all, Florence, not remarkable at all. There should always be someone who knows.
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LibraryThing member splinfo
I haven't read any Alice McDermoot. I'm a fan. From the book cover: "One life: its devastating pains and unexpected joys; its bursts of brilliant clarity and moments of profound confusion. This particular someone is Marie in pre-depression Brooklyn. It's a beautiful piece of fiction. Recommended. KH
LibraryThing member SteveLindahl
The plot of Someone is essentially this: Marie grows older and experiences life. I am not a fan of minimalist plots, but I do understand that good novels have many aspects. This is one that has to be appreciated for reasons other than a strong story line and that’s easy to do. Someone has
Someone is an easy book to sample. A reader can choose almost any paragraph at random and find a thorough, beautiful description with great attention to detail. Here is a description of Marie, the narrator, sitting on a stoop, waiting for her father after watching a street game of stickball.
I pushed my glasses back on my nose. Small city birds the color of ashes rose and fell along the rooftops. In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill. Mr. Chehab walked by with a brown bag from the bakery in his hand. He had his white apron balled up beneath his arm, the ties trailing. There was the scent of new-baked bread as he passed. Big Lucy, a girl I feared, pushed a scooter along the opposite sidewalk. Two Sisters of Charity from the convent down the street passed by, smiling from inside their bonnets. I turned my head to watch their backs, wondering always why their long hems never caught at their heels. At the end of the block, the Sisters paused to greet a heavy woman with thick, pale legs and a dark apron under her coat. She said something to them that made them nod. Then the three turned the corner together. The game paused again, and the boys parted reluctantly as a black car drove by.
I shivered and waited, little Marie. Sole survivor, now, of that street scene. Waited for the first sighting of my father, coming up from the subway in his hat and coat, most beloved among all those ghosts.
Someone is a book for readers who can appreciate the fact that ordinary people lead interesting lives.
Steve Lindahl – author of Motherless Soul and White Horse Regressions
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exquisite writing and intricate character development. Tom and Marie are people I want to know. Their relationship is beautiful. It is based on a common culture along with loving and caring for each other. I enjoyed getting to know them as much as any other characters I’ve met through the books I’ve read this year. Marie’s relationship with her brother, Gabe, is also wonderful. Alice Mcdermott has shown the depth of love so common between a brother and a sister and yet so marvelous to witness. Gabe and Marie both have their problems, but they get through them by supporting each other. Someone is essentially the antithesis of a book like Gone Girl yet both novels are good reads.Someone is an easy book to sample. A reader can choose almost any paragraph at random and find a thorough, beautiful description with great attention to detail. Here is a description of Marie, the narrator, sitting on a stoop, waiting for her father after watching a street game of stickball.
I pushed my glasses back on my nose. Small city birds the color of ashes rose and fell along the rooftops. In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill. Mr. Chehab walked by with a brown bag from the bakery in his hand. He had his white apron balled up beneath his arm, the ties trailing. There was the scent of new-baked bread as he passed. Big Lucy, a girl I feared, pushed a scooter along the opposite sidewalk. Two Sisters of Charity from the convent down the street passed by, smiling from inside their bonnets. I turned my head to watch their backs, wondering always why their long hems never caught at their heels. At the end of the block, the Sisters paused to greet a heavy woman with thick, pale legs and a dark apron under her coat. She said something to them that made them nod. Then the three turned the corner together. The game paused again, and the boys parted reluctantly as a black car drove by.
I shivered and waited, little Marie. Sole survivor, now, of that street scene. Waited for the first sighting of my father, coming up from the subway in his hat and coat, most beloved among all those ghosts.
Someone is a book for readers who can appreciate the fact that ordinary people lead interesting lives.
Steve Lindahl – author of Motherless Soul and White Horse Regressions
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LibraryThing member JimElkins
I had to stop reading this. McDermott's writing is careful and clean, as the reviewers say, and that is definitely a pleasure. But there is a limit to how much time I want to spend with a book that could have been written in 1950. To be fair, the book is set in the 20th century, but it bothers me
For some people this may be a virtue, and in a limited sense it is. It's a virtue to the extent that the book ventriloquizes a certain idea of the past. In that sense it is like any nostalgic novel, any historical novel, and its flaws are only the occasional solecisms and historically inaccurate usages -- the sort of "flaws" that can be found, for example, in Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon."
But in a larger sense, this lack of interest in the last fifty years of novel writing is, for me, a decisive fault. Why read a book that is not part of its time in some way? (With an accent on that phrase, "in some way," meaning that a novel can be connected to the present in many different fashions, by narrative, by content, by style, by mood, by sly allusion, by secret parallel, by subterranean allegory.) This book is pure projection, pure nostalgia: not so much for a certain Irish-American past, although it is that, as for a certain state of the novel, one which is long gone.
I am of course overstating this a little. There are some things in the book that could tell readers it was written in 2013, but for me they are entirely minor. They're small embellishments, slight adjustments on the forms and interests of novels written a half-century ago. For me the only interesting one is McDermott's way of compressing entire narratives into single sentences that are retrospective and prospective, combining prolepsis and nostalgia:
The births of our four children, my mother's death, the kids' tonsillectomies and appendectomies over the years, his hernia, Gabe's breakdown, and how this surgery, tomorrow, to repair my left eye. And wasn't it a corridor much like this that would provide the backdrop for our last parting?
These moments are interesting, but there aren't enough of them to keep me in the novel.
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that it has no signs of having been written in the present. It is almost the case that there is not a single word, idea, image, thought, sentiment, or narrative device that couldn't be found in book published fifty years ago. I could hardly find any new turns of phrase, any new sense of syntax or pacing, any new kinds of narrative, any new images, any new language, any contemporary stylistic influences. For some people this may be a virtue, and in a limited sense it is. It's a virtue to the extent that the book ventriloquizes a certain idea of the past. In that sense it is like any nostalgic novel, any historical novel, and its flaws are only the occasional solecisms and historically inaccurate usages -- the sort of "flaws" that can be found, for example, in Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon."
But in a larger sense, this lack of interest in the last fifty years of novel writing is, for me, a decisive fault. Why read a book that is not part of its time in some way? (With an accent on that phrase, "in some way," meaning that a novel can be connected to the present in many different fashions, by narrative, by content, by style, by mood, by sly allusion, by secret parallel, by subterranean allegory.) This book is pure projection, pure nostalgia: not so much for a certain Irish-American past, although it is that, as for a certain state of the novel, one which is long gone.
I am of course overstating this a little. There are some things in the book that could tell readers it was written in 2013, but for me they are entirely minor. They're small embellishments, slight adjustments on the forms and interests of novels written a half-century ago. For me the only interesting one is McDermott's way of compressing entire narratives into single sentences that are retrospective and prospective, combining prolepsis and nostalgia:
The births of our four children, my mother's death, the kids' tonsillectomies and appendectomies over the years, his hernia, Gabe's breakdown, and how this surgery, tomorrow, to repair my left eye. And wasn't it a corridor much like this that would provide the backdrop for our last parting?
These moments are interesting, but there aren't enough of them to keep me in the novel.
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LibraryThing member EBT1002
I can't remember who recommended that I give Alice McDermott a try but I have now read two of her novels in the past several weeks and I'm delighted to have added her to my list of favorite authors. This, her latest novel, is exquisite in its rendering of an ordinary life in all its
McDermott explores faith without flinching, without apology for frank doubt and a bit of sardonic practicality.
"All the thought and all the worry, all the faith and philosophy, the paintings and the stories and the poems, all the whatnot, gone into the study of heaven or hell, and yet so little wonder applied to the sinking into sleep. Falling asleep. All the prayers I had said before bed throughout my life, all the prayers I had made my children say --- Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be --- the Confiteor if some transgression had taken place --- missed the mark entirely. It was grace, the simple prayer before meals, that we should have been murmuring into our clasped hands at the end of the day: Bless us, oh, Lord, and this thy gift, which we are about to receive."
Ah yes, that is someone who knows what most to be thankful for, who knows the value of escape, in its purest form, escape from pain and loss and loneliness. Sleep is a most precious gift.
McDermott's use of language is both wonderfully straightforward and beautifully lyric. After learning of the lonely death of Bill Corrigan, a character from her childhood, and witnessing at Bill's wake the heartbreak of someone who once broke her own heart, Marie sees into the heart of this man, this Walter. "Walter who had come here tonight --- perhaps the only one of his contemporaries left behind --- come down from the Bronx to weep like a child *before the world closed up over Bill Corrigan's passing*." (italics - between the asterisks - are mine)
It's that last bit that I love. What a way to describe the passing of a human being out of our world, out of our time, eventually out of memory.
And yet, as much as this novel is about loneliness and loss and the terror of both, it is also about love, and about the inevitability of being loved by someone.
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extraordinariness. This is the story of Marie Commeford who grows up in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood with her parents and her brother Gabe. Her intense connection to each member of her family, and the nuances of those sweet but complicated relationships, is captured through stories, and through descriptions of moments: their taste, their smell, the sounds and the sights. McDermott effectively creates the evening in the street with shouting boys playing baseball and shy or awkward girls watching them and hoping to be noticed. There is heartbreak. These lives are not easy. But they are worthwhile; they have meaning and hope and place. Marie grows up, marries, has children. The novel follows her through each decade and it's a lovely story. McDermott explores faith without flinching, without apology for frank doubt and a bit of sardonic practicality.
"All the thought and all the worry, all the faith and philosophy, the paintings and the stories and the poems, all the whatnot, gone into the study of heaven or hell, and yet so little wonder applied to the sinking into sleep. Falling asleep. All the prayers I had said before bed throughout my life, all the prayers I had made my children say --- Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be --- the Confiteor if some transgression had taken place --- missed the mark entirely. It was grace, the simple prayer before meals, that we should have been murmuring into our clasped hands at the end of the day: Bless us, oh, Lord, and this thy gift, which we are about to receive."
Ah yes, that is someone who knows what most to be thankful for, who knows the value of escape, in its purest form, escape from pain and loss and loneliness. Sleep is a most precious gift.
McDermott's use of language is both wonderfully straightforward and beautifully lyric. After learning of the lonely death of Bill Corrigan, a character from her childhood, and witnessing at Bill's wake the heartbreak of someone who once broke her own heart, Marie sees into the heart of this man, this Walter. "Walter who had come here tonight --- perhaps the only one of his contemporaries left behind --- come down from the Bronx to weep like a child *before the world closed up over Bill Corrigan's passing*." (italics - between the asterisks - are mine)
It's that last bit that I love. What a way to describe the passing of a human being out of our world, out of our time, eventually out of memory.
And yet, as much as this novel is about loneliness and loss and the terror of both, it is also about love, and about the inevitability of being loved by someone.
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LibraryThing member TerriBooks
It starts out a little slowly and a little confusing. Marie is a girl growing up in a Brooklyn neighborhood, surrounded by the life of the other families lived in close proximity. We are treated to scenes from her life, first early, then late, then back again. By the end, we have lived through
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Marie's loves and sorrows, her experiences and reflections, and come to know her at her best and maybe her worst. Deceptively simple, the novel ends up being a complex interweaving of her life. Sweet yet deep enough to feel that it was worth the time. Show Less
LibraryThing member annedp
The book was transcendent; the audiobook narrator's lack of a New York accent was agonizing.
LibraryThing member Meredy
Six-word review: Ordinary woman's ordinary life, worth telling.
Extended review:
Life and death: how can there be anything more to say about them? And yet how can there be anything else to write about? That's it, that's us, the human condition.
In this case we view those tightly interwoven threads,
It's hard to describe without resorting to cliches: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the universal in the particular. Truisms are truisms because there is truth in them. This is a novel of truths, ordinary truths, everyday truths, of the same sort that I have in my own life: nothing spectacular, just real. In the end it reminds us that we all have our stories, that all are worth telling.
Extended review:
Life and death: how can there be anything more to say about them? And yet how can there be anything else to write about? That's it, that's us, the human condition.
In this case we view those tightly interwoven threads,
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sheer and yet sturdy like the lace that serves as a recurring motif, both revealing and concealing, through the half-blind eyes of a woman who has lived her life in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, growing up during the Depression, watching the modest triumphs and commonplace tragedies of others unfold around her as she copes with her own. The narrative skips around, more like the voiced reminiscences of an elderly speaker than a unidirectional memoir, complete with repetitions, interruptions, and unself-conscious insights.It's hard to describe without resorting to cliches: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the universal in the particular. Truisms are truisms because there is truth in them. This is a novel of truths, ordinary truths, everyday truths, of the same sort that I have in my own life: nothing spectacular, just real. In the end it reminds us that we all have our stories, that all are worth telling.
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LibraryThing member nyiper
I was a little surprised how much I liked the audio of this book. I wasn't sure from the CD's brief description but it was such an interesting look at one woman's life---shifting back and forth in time. Just a normal life, whatever that means....Marie is "someone" and we see the life she led with
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different events and how they affected other parts of her life. Show Less
LibraryThing member objectplace
plain and unremarkable Marie finds her way, the path and connections that unfold are lovely and remarkable.
LibraryThing member pjpjx
Like almost all the rest, I too found this a lovely book. A simple story about a simple life, yet insightful and beautifully written. At the end of the book, the protagonist is blind and living in an assisted-care facility, but not unhappy, indeed with a certain contentment of how here life was
"If I could dream again, I would dream myself back into that room, in that hour, and take the stained cushion next to him."
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woven. She recalls the day many years before when her brother, a failed priest, comes to her home after being in a mental institute. The day she realizes he was gay, though that is almost an aside. The brother will live the rest of his life with her and her husband. Both are dead many years now. She remembers how at the end of that long ago, hot summer day, how she sat in the screened, backyard porch next to her husband and thinks:"If I could dream again, I would dream myself back into that room, in that hour, and take the stained cushion next to him."
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LibraryThing member annebrackens
This is a timeless novel. About timeless issues. Love and loneliness. Hauntingly beautiful. Written with the grace of a master. Very few books could make me feel such authenticity of relationships. Daughter, sister, wife, mother. Marie's life is a testament to kindness. Thank you Alice for this
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amazing novel. Show Less
LibraryThing member ozzer
The central theme of this wonderful novel is how we all have times when we have disappointments and almost fall but are often saved by “someone.” The central character is Marie Commeford, who remembers incidents in her life, which illustrate how often someone is there to save and comfort us
The novel begins and ends with Pegeen Chehab. She died as a young woman by falling down stairs. Marie’s mother describes her thusly: “And after all that, and after all that, along comes homely Pegeen, with her mother’s blotched skin and her father’s big nose and those great long feet, God help her.” In the end, Marie remembers that Pegeen was looking for someone nice who might catch her if she pretended to fall.
Marie is a stubborn little pagan ( “a bold piece” ), who is the opposite of her brother, Gabe, who is an intellectual who wants to become a priest. Despite their differences, they have a loving and nurturing relationship. Gabe councils Marie after she is jilted by her first love--Walter Hartnett. They go for a walk when he tells her that “someone” will love her. Ironically, they meet an acquaintance of Gabe’s on the walk—Tom Commeford—the man Marie will later fall in love with and marry. Marie opens her home and family to Gabe after he suffers a breakdown and takes Gabe’s pills away when he is despondent after a visit from Matt Cain—a person who was probably his partner.
Other instances of nurturing and salvation are common in the novel. Tom provides a loving home environment for Marie. Her children—especially the girls-- help her in her old age after a botched eye surgery. A blind neighborhood boy—Bill Corrigan—is befriended by Walter and displays compassion when other boys tease Bill by telling him that his mother has died. Marie’s mother wants to die in Brooklyn despite its becoming run down and dangerous. She asks Gabe—“Am I home?”—meaning Brooklyn—not Rego Park where she was staying with Marie’s family. He carries her down to the street so that she can actually see that she is indeed in Brooklyn. Marie gets a job working at Fagin’s funeral home as the token woman and consoler. There, she learns about death and how to comfort people when they are suffering. Gabe wanders the streets naked after having a mental breakdown and a woman follows him with a blanket. Marie has a very difficult birth of her first child—anesthetic is withheld, her incision becomes infected and she is given the last rites. She knew she couldn’t die because “my presence on earth was never more urgently needed.” Interesting, her childhood friend’s mother does die in childbirth and Gerty is left to care for her infant sister—Durna. “…this, then, was the way of all sorrow—closed up, forgotten, vanished in the wink of an eye.”
Marie’s marriage is long standing and successful, unlike a childhood neighbor whose marriage lasts one day, because her spouse was rumored to be a woman. Marie’s marital success is largely due to her relationship with Tom, who is loving and attentive. He was an orphan as a child and also was a POW during the war. His tale of his capture is another instance of falling and salvation. Tom bails out of his plane and is threatened by a German, who had recently lost his son in the war. Tom is saved from almost certain death by a German officer.
At the end of her life, Marie is “5 years widowed, 8 years without Gabe, 30 years without her mother and 66 years without her father with 4 grown children.” A conversation with her caregiver captures the theme once again: “If you are the caregiver, does that make me the caretaker?” Aren’t we all care givers and takers?
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when we fall and how important this is to our well-being.The novel begins and ends with Pegeen Chehab. She died as a young woman by falling down stairs. Marie’s mother describes her thusly: “And after all that, and after all that, along comes homely Pegeen, with her mother’s blotched skin and her father’s big nose and those great long feet, God help her.” In the end, Marie remembers that Pegeen was looking for someone nice who might catch her if she pretended to fall.
Marie is a stubborn little pagan ( “a bold piece” ), who is the opposite of her brother, Gabe, who is an intellectual who wants to become a priest. Despite their differences, they have a loving and nurturing relationship. Gabe councils Marie after she is jilted by her first love--Walter Hartnett. They go for a walk when he tells her that “someone” will love her. Ironically, they meet an acquaintance of Gabe’s on the walk—Tom Commeford—the man Marie will later fall in love with and marry. Marie opens her home and family to Gabe after he suffers a breakdown and takes Gabe’s pills away when he is despondent after a visit from Matt Cain—a person who was probably his partner.
Other instances of nurturing and salvation are common in the novel. Tom provides a loving home environment for Marie. Her children—especially the girls-- help her in her old age after a botched eye surgery. A blind neighborhood boy—Bill Corrigan—is befriended by Walter and displays compassion when other boys tease Bill by telling him that his mother has died. Marie’s mother wants to die in Brooklyn despite its becoming run down and dangerous. She asks Gabe—“Am I home?”—meaning Brooklyn—not Rego Park where she was staying with Marie’s family. He carries her down to the street so that she can actually see that she is indeed in Brooklyn. Marie gets a job working at Fagin’s funeral home as the token woman and consoler. There, she learns about death and how to comfort people when they are suffering. Gabe wanders the streets naked after having a mental breakdown and a woman follows him with a blanket. Marie has a very difficult birth of her first child—anesthetic is withheld, her incision becomes infected and she is given the last rites. She knew she couldn’t die because “my presence on earth was never more urgently needed.” Interesting, her childhood friend’s mother does die in childbirth and Gerty is left to care for her infant sister—Durna. “…this, then, was the way of all sorrow—closed up, forgotten, vanished in the wink of an eye.”
Marie’s marriage is long standing and successful, unlike a childhood neighbor whose marriage lasts one day, because her spouse was rumored to be a woman. Marie’s marital success is largely due to her relationship with Tom, who is loving and attentive. He was an orphan as a child and also was a POW during the war. His tale of his capture is another instance of falling and salvation. Tom bails out of his plane and is threatened by a German, who had recently lost his son in the war. Tom is saved from almost certain death by a German officer.
At the end of her life, Marie is “5 years widowed, 8 years without Gabe, 30 years without her mother and 66 years without her father with 4 grown children.” A conversation with her caregiver captures the theme once again: “If you are the caregiver, does that make me the caretaker?” Aren’t we all care givers and takers?
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LibraryThing member froxgirl
What a haunting photo album of a book. Marie is a 7 year old, a young bride, a loving sister, an oppositional daughter, in a nursing home, and most of all an observer and thinker. Each long scene can be cherished and reread. The closest to this is the beloved "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", but with
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the protagonist more sophisticated and setting new highs (and lows) in sheer stubbornness. Alice McDermott hits the mark again as she did with "At Weddings and Wakes". Show Less
LibraryThing member nivramkoorb
This is my 2nd Alice McDermott novel. She is an author who won a National Book Award for Charming Billy which I enjoyed. This book about Marie covers her life through various entry points. It is not written chronologically. The style is sparse and the writing is excellent. This is simply a story
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about a person's life and deals with what is like to have family and be part of a community. It is not for everyone so if you are looking for a plot and action, then this is not for you, but as a character study and a good insight into someone's life, it is a good read. Show Less
LibraryThing member viviennestrauss
A touching read of one American family, written so you could truly enter a particular time and place in history.
LibraryThing member snash
An excellent portrayal of an ordinary life, poignant with a hint of mystery and with the atmosphere, smell and vision of every scene clearly presented.
LibraryThing member Lilalu
Several memories or maybe vignettes during the life of a average women, who comes alive and seems much more than average by the end of the book. Sweet and well told, I felt like I could drop by her house and find the teacups to make myself a cup of tea, and be right at home. As long as I had a
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story to tell. Show Less
LibraryThing member janismack
Marie Commerford comes into the story as a child as we follow her into old age. Her life is ordinary as well as extraordinary as we follow along through ups and downs of her life.
LibraryThing member CasualFriday
This is a gentle, humane portrayal of an Irish Catholic family growing up in Brooklyn. Marie survives an early heartbreak, at the hands of a man only a naive young girl would fall for. Although she is not domestic - she has an odd stubborn streak and refuses to learn to cook - she prefers the
I almost always love these character-driven, quiet stories, but this one was perhaps a little too quiet for me. My view may be colored by the fact that I listened to the audio book, and the time-shifting nature of the narrative was sometimes confusing in that format. Also, the narrator was just awful, reading the book in an excruciatingly slow, open-mic-poetry-night voice with the annoying lilting uptick that novice poetry readers often put at the end of each line. I wish I had read the print book.
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safety of the family until her mother arranges for her to take a job at the local funeral home. One of her closest relationships is with her brother Gabe, who entered and quickly left the priesthood for reasons left murky. It is Gabe who introduces Marie to Tom, whom she eventually marries.I almost always love these character-driven, quiet stories, but this one was perhaps a little too quiet for me. My view may be colored by the fact that I listened to the audio book, and the time-shifting nature of the narrative was sometimes confusing in that format. Also, the narrator was just awful, reading the book in an excruciatingly slow, open-mic-poetry-night voice with the annoying lilting uptick that novice poetry readers often put at the end of each line. I wish I had read the print book.
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Awards
National Book Award (Longlist — Fiction — 2013)
Dublin Literary Award (Shortlist — 2015)
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Fiction — 2013)
Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Shortlist — Fiction — 2014)
Maine Readers' Choice Award (Longlist — 2014)
Paterson Fiction Prize (Finalist — 2014)
Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year (Fiction — 2013)
NPR: Books We Love (2013)
Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Historical Fiction — 2013)
San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year (Fiction/Poetry — 2013)
Los Angeles Public Library Best of the Year (Fiction — 2013)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2013
DDC/MDS
| 813.54 |
ISBN
9780374281090
Other editions
Someone: A Novel by Alice McDermott (Paperback)