Some lives are sacrificed for a good cause and other lives are wasted for no particular reason - and this is a novel where sacrifice and waste confront and respond to each other in many different ways. It's a story about Catholic nuns and working class people in Brooklyn and it begins when a young man commits suicide. His pregnant wife Annie is then taken in by The Little Sisters of the Poor. She earns her keep by working in their laundry, washing and ironing the sister's habits and laundering the soiled sheets of the many sick who they care for.
When her daughter Sally is born, Annie raises her with the help of the nuns. What would they do without Annie and the joy of this baby in their lives? Annie provides warmth and good humor and besides, the washing never ends. Neither does her sacrifice. Bodily fluids, human filth and the stains of humanity are endlessly scrubbed out in the laundry. The nuns are efficient and starched and their approach to getting through life and dealing with human weakness is "Never waste your sympathy... never think for a minute that you will erase all suffering from the world with your charms." At least this is what Sister Lucy tells Sally when they visit the invalided Mrs Costello.
Mrs Costello is a particularly nasty patient, simpering, demanding and completely charmless. When she lost her leg to a septic infection she decided to use her injury as an excuse - while her husband Mr Costello, a kindly milkman must look elsewhere for companionship. He finds it in his friendship with Sally's mother Annie, a warm and natural woman, who like him is also at risk of spending her life in penance - for her husband's suicide.
Then it seems that Sally must also sacrifice - as all good people do in this book - by serving God and entering a convent in far away Chicago. When she takes a train to begin this new life, the journey is described as a kind of purgatory - populated by difficult, unpleasant and dirty people who Sally is not up to saving. For me these pages are just about the best writing in the book.
Other characters in the novel also make different kinds of sacrifices for the sake of the less deserving. There is Red Whelan who takes the place of his friend Michael Tierney in the Civil War and returns without an arm and a leg. Michael is ever indebted, so that when his son falls in love with a working class girl he cannot give them his blessing. "Is this what Red Whelan threw away an arm and a leg for - so the fruit of his sacrifice can drag us back to the slums?"
Alice McDermott clearly has a deep fondness for her characters, especially for the nuns. She has written them as fully realized, dedicated and interesting individuals. But is sacrifice always God's will? Must everyone in contact with Mrs. Costello have the thankless task of caring for her, listening to her endless complaints while changing her nighties and sheets and emptying out her disgusting chamber pot? And where is the reward? Only in the hereafter? Is Mr Costello supposed to live in a world without love? Is Sally's mother Annie also to live without love? And what about Sally herself?
"There is a hunger" the sisters explain. But since it isn't a hunger that any of them have, they don't known what to do about it. The hunger they encounter always takes an ugly form. And death hovers over everything. The passage of time and the way time behaves in the presence of death is movingly conveyed in this thoughtful and elegantly written novel.
#ninthhournovel #alicemcdermottninthhour
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