The Ninth Hour, What About the Baby?

What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

Alice McDermott (2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Ninth Hour

Alice McDermott (2017, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

     Alice McDermott has taught fiction writing for decades, and written eight well-received novels. I read her book about writing fiction alongside her recent novel, to the benefit of both; What About the Baby shed considerable light on why The Ninth Hour worked so well.

      The novel is set in Irish-Catholic Brooklyn, mainly in the early twentieth century. The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross wield a great influence because they show up for the sick and needy. They are, themselves, dependent on money collected pennies at a time, or raised from "idle Catholic women married to successful men." In the first scene of the book, Annie is widowed under awkward circumstances, and Sister St. Saviour is right on the spot. Her efforts to have Annie's husband buried in consecrated ground come to naught, but she's able to conjure up a job for Annie in the basement of the convent, helping with the laundry. Her daughter, Sally, grows up a little sister to the Little Sisters.

      Sister Lucy and Sister Jeanne cobble together a friendship for Annie with Elizabeth Tierney, who lives down the street, and the women stroll out together in the mornings. Sally will not grow up to be a nun, though she'll flirt with the idea, and she'll inherit her father's depressive streak. Instead, she'll grow up and marry one of the Tierney boys; their children provide the narrative voice in some chapters. Sister Jeanne will remain in all their lives, a friend for generations.

      One of McDermott's principles is that fiction "ought to contain, consistently, characters who, if they don't shine with the light of their uniquely individual souls, shimmer at least with that soul's unplumbed or as yet unillustrated possibilities." On this account, she's successful. Each of the nuns has her characteristic ways, including little disagreements with the other nuns, and episodes of irritation or envy. Mr. Costello, the milk-man, is tidy and dutiful, though his wife, an invalid, "was childish, sometimes churlish."

      The characters, she says, have to inhabit a specific place. Everything they eat or drink, sit on or wear, has to come to us in words, and they have to be the right words. Mr. Costello, for instance, "does as much dusting as a man could be expected to do: the top of a bureau, but not the legs; the base of a lamp, but not the shade." Mr. Tierney's Aunt Rose is remembered with "a velvet hat and a pale broadcloth suit, rose-colored perhaps, and maybe the smell of rosewater about her..." Knowing how things feel and smell brings the action to life, even more than a movie would.

      That scent of roses appears in other places, including the deathbed of Sister St. Saviour, though there's room for debate as to whether that was the odor of sanctity, or just an open window. McDermott commends to writers the habit of weaving in connections from one chapter to another. "I am not making a pitch for artifice, manipulation, or trickery, but rather for discovery." The extended description of the convent's laundry, early on, will resonate over and over through the story. Sister Illuminata keeps the nuns clean and starched, of course. She also washes the soiled linens generated by nursing. With Annie's help, she sorts, washes, and mends the neighborhood's castoff clothing, and we're not surprised to see little Sally wearing it.

      McDermott credits a rereading of Middlemarch with identifying a principle theme of her work. George Eliot describes Saint Theresa, whose "passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life." But how many lives, especially women's, never reach that ideal? McDermott says, "I wanted to write about these women, these Saint Theresas who longed for but missed the epic life, who were foundresses of nothing. I wanted to say something about them."

        The Little Sisters of the Sick Poor are destined to die off faster than they are replaced, and the bishop will probably take back their fine house. They are woefully ineffective against certain cruelties of the world, especially those that arise from men. But the work they have done matters, nonetheless, down to the last cup of tea, and the crumbs swept up afterward. McDermott's work matters, too. The creative life of fits and starts being what it is, thirty-five years elapsed between that dip into Middlemarch and this novel, which, "...it might be said, is indeed about women 'whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed...' "

 

 

 

Any Good Books, by mail October 1, 2021