★ 07/17/2017
National Book Award winner McDermott (Someone) delivers an immense, brilliant novel about the limits of faith, the power of sacrifice, and the cost of forgiveness. Set in Brooklyn in the early 20th century, the story begins in tragedy as young and pregnant Annie, an Irish immigrant, returns home to her shabby tenement apartment to find her 32-year-old husband dead from intentional carbon monoxide poisoning. In order to make money, Annie takes a job doing laundry at the local convent. In turn, the nuns of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor help Annie raise her daughter, Sally, after she is born. As Sally pushes through adolescence, the influence of the strict yet benevolent sisters and the church’s teachings takes hold. At 18, Sally embarks on her own novitiate journey, accompanying Sister Lucy and bubbly Sister Jeanne to the cluttered homes and sickbeds of New York’s most poor and wretched. The novel jumps around in time and spans three generations, exploring the paths of Annie, Sally, and Sally’s children. But it’s the thread that follows Sally’s coming of age and eventual lapse of faith that is the most absorbing. Scenes detailing her benevolent encounters, especially her stint taking care of cantankerous and one-legged Mrs. Costello, are paradoxically grotesque and irresistible. As in her other novels, McDermott exhibits a keen eye for character, especially regarding the nuns (Sister Lucy, who “lived with a small, tight knot of fury at the center of her chest,” is most memorable). (Sept.)
PRAISE FOR THE NINTH HOUR
"In this enveloping, emotionally intricate, suspenseful drama, McDermott lures readers into her latest meticulously rendered Irish American enclave. . . Like Alice Munro, McDermott is profoundly observant and mischievously witty, a sensitive and consummate illuminator of the realization of the self, the ravages of illness and loss, and the radiance of generosity. . . McDermott’s extraordinary precision, compassion, and artistry are entrancing and sublime. . . This is one of literary master McDermott’s most exquisite works." —Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
“Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermottt’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Literary Fiction Picks for Fall 2017
Excerpted in The New Yorker
PRAISE FOR ALICE MCDERMOTT
“McDermott has the soul of an archaeologist—excavating shards of the daily routine, closely examining the cracks and crevices of the human heart.” —O Magazine
“Exquisite. . . deft. . . filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death.” —The New York Times
“Packed with complexity and emotion” —The Washington Post
“Filled with subtle insights and abundant empathy and grace.” —USA Today
“Lyrical study of quotidian life. . . McDermott manages to write lyrically in plain language, she is able to find the drama in uninflected experience.” —Los Angeles Times
“With virtuosic concision, McDermott assembles this swirl of seemingly mundane anecdotes into a powerful examination of love, mortality, and ‘the way of all flesh.’” —The New Yorker
"The micropoetry elevates the book from a gently story to a multilayered Our Town-like tale.” —People
“Each slide, each scene, from the ostensibly inconsequential to the clearly momentous, is illuminated with equal care.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The landscape of memory is a chiaroscuro in motion.” —Boston Globe
“That’s the spectacular power of McDermott’s writing: Without ever putting on literary airs, she reveals to us what’s distinct about characters who don’t have the ego or eloquence to make a case for themselves as being anything special.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR
“Extraordinary art woven out of ordinary lives.” —The Quivering Pen
“Gripping and resonant. . . In her own way, she achieves as much as the dazzling, muscular ‘hysterical realists.’ For she manages to break all the basic rules of writing—only quietly.” —NPR
“Almost without exception, each moment . . . is so thoroughly mined so that every story, nearly every thought it seems, reveals the true complexity of our lives.” —The Coffin Factory
“[McDermott] is a sublime artist of the quotidian.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“In beautifully understated language and an unerringly nimble free-associative narrative, McDermott weaves such an intimate complex life study that we feel each . . . accumulating loss until they become staggering.” —Elle
★ 08/01/2017
This seamlessly written new work from National Book Award winner McDermott (Someone) asks how much we owe others, how much we owe ourselves, and, of course, given McDermott's consistent attention to the Catholic faith, how much we owe God. Not much on any account for Irish immigrant Jim, down on his luck through his own doing, who turned on the gas in his early 1900s Brooklyn tenement and killed himself while nearly incinerating the building. He left behind pregnant wife Annie, comforted by Sister St. Saviour of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, who boldly bargains with God in an effort to assure the victim a proper Catholic burial. Annie secures work at the convent, helping tough-but-tender Sister Illuminata in the laundry while befriending spitfire young Sister Jeanne and raising her daughter, Sally. In the end, both Sally and Jeanne make sacrifices of conscience to assure Annie's happiness. But as we see, Michael Tierney, head of a family to which both mother and daughter are close, refused to sacrifice himself to his father's wishes. VERDICT In lucid, flowing prose, McDermott weaves her characters' stories to powerful effect. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/8/17.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
★ 2017-06-06
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. "It was Sister St. Savior's vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands." By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and "the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses." This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what's to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms. Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott's (Someone, 2013, etc.) stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.
