At the Library

I recently discovered an author that I thought I was rediscovering. In my head I was certain I had already read several books by Alice McDermott some years ago. So when I ran across After This, a 2006 publication, I got that giddy feeling we get when we realize we have a new book to dive into from a favorite author. After This proved as delightful as I expected. Alice Mc Dermott generally writes about the daily lives of families in the 1940s-1960s and her novels are often set in the suburbs of New York. One of her specialties is crystal-clear descriptions of childhood. She can take you right into your 8-year-old self. My favorite moment in After This was the description of a mother and daughter, waiting in line on a hot summer day to see an exhibit at the 1939 World?s Fair. ?She and her mother, who did not drive, had steered a green convertible into the dark, past dinosaurs and the invention of the wheel and into a shimmering city of tall white towers, the threshold of tomorrow. They had sat-after the hour wait-in a moving theater as a mechanical family, as real as her own, lived through the 1800s and 1900s and into the next century, only their faces unchanging. They?d watched gray dolphins leap out of a blue pool and hang suspended above the ordinary Queens skyline. They?d walked quietly through the spiced air of Asia, where tiny chimes sounded softly and incense was burned, and through a chilly Alpine village that actually smelled of snow. They?d sat side by side in a moving chair that took them past lunar bases and underwater farms and along a glittering continental highway while a voice like God?s told them, whispering softly in their ears, that the present was just an instant between infinite past and a hurrying future.?

After reading this I went back to the stacks in the WPL collection and found the other McDermott novels we own including At Weddings and Wakes (1992), Child of my Heart (2002), and Someone (2013). I loved all of them as well, but none of them seemed familiar as I had expected. At Weddings and Wakes opens with a mother taking her children through a twice-weekly ritual where they board, ride, and depart several trains to get from their suburban home to inner-city Brooklyn in order to visit her stepmother and unmarried sisters. McDermott details every step with the family and you almost feel as if you could extend your hand and the mother will lead you too, through these gritty train rides. In my opinion, Child of My Heart is the perfect summer read. The main character, Therese, is 15 and spending her summer as the neighborhood babysitter on Long Island. You instantly want to be one of her kids as she tromps you out for a day at the beach, tents you under a towel to pull on your suit, and encourages you to sink your toes into the sand and watch the water wash it all away. Therese takes on her adolescent challenges with patient and calm demeanor that most adults would admire. Finally, the novel Someone continues McDermott?s tradition of describing ordinary family life, but ultimately showing that life is not really ordinary at all.

I am so glad I discovered Alice McDermott. I think I must have been dreaming of her novels all along.