Someone, by Alice McDermott

A warmly and touchingly told story of an ordinary life.  And there’s not a thing wrong with that.  It reminds me of the lyrics of a Paul McCartney’s song, “Some people think the world has had enough of silly love songs.  But I look around me and I see...it isn’t so.”  Marie is born in and lives out her life in Brooklyn, one of two children in a working class family, far from wealthy but not terribly poor either, gets hurt in love, then finds love and marries, bears and raises children, nothing out of the ordinary.  Nothing.  And yet it’s a story that draws you in.  Maybe it’s the ordinariness that feels familiar, and still important, as if the snub of one world leader by another is no more significant than a slight of one grade schooler by another.  The hurt is the same.  The small injuries and triumphs are familiar, relatable to all of us, I would think. 

Marie tells her story in first person, as it should of course be told, and she uses plain language, words you would not doubt would come from an ordinary girl from Brooklyn.  “...[she] blew some exasperated air from her pooched-out lip.”  “My father smelled, always, of fresh newsprint and cigarettes, of the alcohol in his faded cologne.”  McDermott makes rich use of smells throughout, the sense that most strongly piques our memory.  Her descriptive passages are vivid, so clear and simple I can picture the scene, I can feel it.  “I pushed my glasses back on my nose.  In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill.  Mr. Chehab walked by with a brown bag from the bakery in his hand.  He had his white apron balled up beneath his arm, the ties trailing.   There was the scent of new-baked bread as he passed.”  An ordinary child observing and ordinary setting.  Nice.  

Of course there were moments that made me tear up a little, which is no great accomplishment given that I’m a sucker for touching moments.  But it would be a weakness if this book failed to elicit that response, given the kind of story it is. In a scene later in life, her brother has just been released from a mental institution following a breakdown, and she and her children are making small talk in the kitchen, pretending there’s no awkwardness in the situation.  Marie notices her brother still wears the hospital bracelet.  Without a break in the conversation, “I slipped the kitchen shears between the plastic cuff and the blue underside of his narrow wrist.  I neatly cut the think in half, then touched his knee before I carried the bracelet to the trash.”  She calls it “the thing” and disposes of it as if her action could dispose of the reason for his time in the mental institution just the same.  Very sweet. 

It sort of reminds me of stories by Anne Tyler, stories of no earth-shattering import, just ordinary people living their ordinary lives, but told in a way that feels important, feels familiar, feels true. Nice, pleasurable reading.