In the seductive, sumptuous world of Alice McDermott's fiction, life is always subdued by loss, love is always inseparable from ache and compassion is always the incomparable salvation, the counterweight to both circumstance and fate. In books like That Night , At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy , which won the National Book Award in 1998, McDermott created characters so real and so complex that one could hear them, see them and know them. With Child of My Heart , the author's fifth novel, McDermott introduces a cast of preternaturally precocious children who move about a seaside town with the sort of tenderness and disquieting foreknowledge that is denied to most preoccupied adults. Child of My Heart is startlingly touching, limned with both glimmer and shadow, sweetness and despair, premonition and memory. Its nostalgia is of the Irish variety, in which beauty and heartbreak are kept apart by very slender lines.
At first, this appears to be McDermott's simplest book. The core of the story plays out over the course of just a few days, for one thing, and the events are relayed in neat, nearly chronological order, for another. And yet so much happens to so many hearts, so much is revealed and then forsaken, and so much is finally placed at stake that this may well be McDermott's finest achievement. The novel's protagonist and narrator is a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty named Theresa—the only child of older, undereducated parents whose move to Long Island years before was precipitated by their desire to place their daughter in close proximity to wealth and status. By the time Theresa is ten, Theresa's mother is encouraging her to answer all thehelpmate ads. By the following summer, she is the most sought-after caretaker on the eastern tip of Long Island—loved by little girls and boys, by dogs and cats and rabbits.
When the book opens, Theresa is fifteen. Her eight-year-old cousin, whom she dubs Daisy Mae, has come to Long Island for an extended visit, and together the two administer to a growing entourage of animals and neighbors, not to mention the toddler daughter of an inscrutable and possibly famous local artist. They move from house to house, taking dogs out for walks, rescuing a dirty baby from her brothers' abandonment, saving the toddler Flora from the inconceivable neglect of her recently departed mother and her old (but still sexy) painter-father.
Theresa, of course, is the one in charge, but Daisy Mae, the shy and seemingly tentative child of an overcrowded household, soon reveals her own enormous capacity for improving the lives of others. They are a stunning duo, Theresa and Daisy Mae, and McDermott spins their story with aplomb, revealing them to the reader as they reveal themselves to each other. Theresa is never anything short of loving or imaginative. Daisy Mae is nothing less than the perfect recipient for Theresa's love. They grow sweetly conspiratorial in the stories they tell, in the games they make up, in the kindness they dollop onto others. They grow closer than most sisters ever do.
But there is something dark beneath this surface. There is something neither girl is saying. There is, for example, the unwanted, perhaps even dangerous, attention shown to them by lonely men. There is the chaos of the neighbors next door, so many filthy children, so much parental neglect. But most of all, Daisy Mae is not well, and this is no temporary sickness. There are bruises on her feet, on her back, on her arms. There is a fever in her skin. She is pale and anemic and she tires easily, and none of the adults are paying much attention. Theresa knows that it is up to her to tell the truth about her cousin's blooming bruises. Yet she is wise enough to recognize that if she tells an adult what she has seen, she will rob her cousin of the summer.
So Theresa finds a way to feed Daisy Mae St. Joseph's aspirins instead. She gets more liver and spinach into her cousin's diet. She takes her to the beach and begins what she calls a "peculiar therapy," hoping it will cure the bright blue feet: "I had Daisy stand at the shoreline," Theresa says, "where the waves could swirl around her feet, but not so far in that they could upset her balance. I told her to stand in one place while the water rushed around her ankles and her feet sank into the sand, and then, when the wave went out again, to pull her feet out, move a bit to the left or the right, and then let them sink in again." The love Theresa has for Daisy Mae is huge and overwhelming, but it is the way that Daisy Mae reciprocates that is most touching of all. Love this big can never survive, and McDermott is keen to that. What she gives us here is the dream and its denial, a novel that hurts as much as it heals, and that has all the weight and beauty of a classic.
It is all too beautiful, especially because McDermott, writing with her famous subtlety and style, makes us understand that the girls' innocence might be coming to its end. Child of My Heart is a book of astonishing craft and enormous heart. Line after line evokes and pricks. Truth after truth gets spoken. —Beth Kephart
In the seductive, sumptuous world of Alice McDermott's fiction, life is always subdued by loss, love is always inseparable from ache and compassion is always the incomparable salvation, the counterweight to both circumstance and fate. In books like That Night, At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award in 1998, McDermott created characters so real and so complex that one could hear them, see them and know them. With Child of My Heart, the author's fifth novel, McDermott introduces a cast of preternaturally precocious children who move about a seaside town with the sort of tenderness and disquieting foreknowledge that is denied to most preoccupied adults. Child of My Heart is startlingly touching, limned with both glimmer and shadow, sweetness and despair, premonition and memory. Its nostalgia is of the Irish variety, in which beauty and heartbreak are kept apart by very slender lines.
At first, this appears to be McDermott's simplest book. The core of the story plays out over the course of just a few days, for one thing, and the events are relayed in neat, nearly chronological order, for another. And yet so much happens to so many hearts, so much is revealed and then forsaken, and so much is finally placed at stake that this may well be McDermott's finest achievement. The novel's protagonist and narrator is a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty named Theresa—the only child of older, undereducated parents whose move to Long Island years before was precipitated by their desire to place their daughter in close proximity to wealth and status. By the time Theresa is ten, Theresa's mother is encouraging her to answer all the helpmate ads. By thefollowing summer, she is the most sought-after caretaker on the eastern tip of Long Island—loved by little girls and boys, by dogs and cats and rabbits.
When the book opens, Theresa is fifteen. Her eight-year-old cousin, whom she dubs Daisy Mae, has come to Long Island for an extended visit, and together the two administer to a growing entourage of animals and neighbors, not to mention the toddler daughter of an inscrutable and possibly famous local artist. They move from house to house, taking dogs out for walks, rescuing a dirty baby from her brothers' abandonment, saving the toddler Flora from the inconceivable neglect of her recently departed mother and her old (but still sexy) painter-father.
Theresa, of course, is the one in charge, but Daisy Mae, the shy and seemingly tentative child of an overcrowded household, soon reveals her own enormous capacity for improving the lives of others. They are a stunning duo, Theresa and Daisy Mae, and McDermott spins their story with aplomb, revealing them to the reader as they reveal themselves to each other. Theresa is never anything short of loving or imaginative. Daisy Mae is nothing less than the perfect recipient for Theresa's love. They grow sweetly conspiratorial in the stories they tell, in the games they make up, in the kindness they dollop onto others. They grow closer than most sisters ever do.
But there is something dark beneath this surface. There is something neither girl is saying. There is, for example, the unwanted, perhaps even dangerous, attention shown to them by lonely men. There is the chaos of the neighbors next door, so many filthy children, so much parental neglect. But most of all, Daisy Mae is not well, and this is no temporary sickness. There are bruises on her feet, on her back, on her arms. There is a fever in her skin. She is pale and anemic and she tires easily, and none of the adults are paying much attention. Theresa knows that it is up to her to tell the truth about her cousin's blooming bruises. Yet she is wise enough to recognize that if she tells an adult what she has seen, she will rob her cousin of the summer.
So Theresa finds a way to feed Daisy Mae St. Joseph's aspirins instead. She gets more liver and spinach into her cousin's diet. She takes her to the beach and begins what she calls a "peculiar therapy," hoping it will cure the bright blue feet: "I had Daisy stand at the shoreline," Theresa says, "where the waves could swirl around her feet, but not so far in that they could upset her balance. I told her to stand in one place while the water rushed around her ankles and her feet sank into the sand, and then, when the wave went out again, to pull her feet out, move a bit to the left or the right, and then let them sink in again." The love Theresa has for Daisy Mae is huge and overwhelming, but it is the way that Daisy Mae reciprocates that is most touching of all. Love this big can never survive, and McDermott is keen to that. What she gives us here is the dream and its denial, a novel that hurts as much as it heals, and that has all the weight and beauty of a classic.
It is all too beautiful, especially because McDermott, writing with her famous subtlety and style, makes us understand that the girls' innocence might be coming to its end. Child of My Heart is a book of astonishing craft and enormous heart. Line after line evokes and pricks. Truth after truth gets spoken.
After the National Book Award–winning Charming Billy (1998), McDermott returns to the familiar turf of her earlier fiction: East Hampton and the inner life of a precocious girl one crucial summer. Theresa lives a quietly secure life as the only child of doting, middle-aged Irish Catholic parents with upwardly mobile aspirations. By the summer she is 15, Theresa--the name’s saintly resonance may strike readers as a bit obvious--is not only lovely but wise and kind as well, adored by the young children and animals she cares for. In contrast, her eight-year-old cousin, "Poor Daisy," is mousy, pale, and generally overlooked among a cramped houseful of siblings in Queens Village. Sorry for Daisy and also sensing a special kinship of imagination, Theresa invites the younger girl to East Hampton for the summer. Daisy arrives with pink plastic sandals she won’t take off. When Theresa stumbles across the reason--bruises on Daisy’s feet and body she can’t explain--a sense of foreboding falls like a shadow of death across the summer. But the foreboding is sexual as well. Theresa and Daisy spend most of their days babysitting the two-year-old daughter of a famous artist. When his much younger wife decamps one morning after letting Theresa know she may be the painter’s next conquest, Theresa finds herself both repulsed and attracted. Day by day, as Daisy’s health deteriorates, Theresa’s sexuality ripens. Meanwhile, the ever-observant Theresa is silent witness to the tragedies rippling under her community’s placid surface: neglected children desperate for affection; a divorced father whose longing for his children almost perverts him; the "tweedy" dowager whose overbearing cheerfulness masks maternalgrief. Though hobbled by a tendency toward sentimentality and self-consciousness, McDermott sculpts her small story with a meticulous eye for the telling detail and transcendent metaphor. We know what’s coming, but so do the characters--that’s part of this tale’s bittersweet power. Author tour
[A] wondrous new novel. . .Alice McDermott is a genius of quiet observation. . .Like Jane Austen, McDermott, one of our finest novelists writing today, is the master of a domain that in the hands of most writers would be limiting. . .Child of My Heart extends her artistic triumphs, and we should be grateful.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A master. . .As good as any literary novelist writing today, and when I say that I include the big guns: Russell Banks, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison. . .All her books mirror the essential truths of existence so sure-handedly that they are neither comedies nor tragedies, but merely true.” —Anna Quindlen
“Has something of a classic about it. . .[Its] craftsmanship and its moral intelligence are as one. . ..Immaculate.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Richly textured, intricately woven. . .a work not only of, but about, the imagination.” —Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books
“In a league of her own.” —People
“We have echoes and stirrings of Hardy, Shakespeare, Dickens, James, Beatrix Potter, Christina Rosetti... [Theresa] is a vessel containing a multitude of heroines, a transcendence of ethereal beauties who loved and live in the minds of their readers and inventors.” —Chicago Tribune
“[A] quietly enchanting novel, graced by McDermott's well-calibrated writing and observant eye...Filled with subtle truths and hard-won wisdom.” —The Charlotte Observer
