FictionAfter This, Alice McDermott's sixth novel, opens with a fine dramatic Shakespearian storm and closes with a wedding. Its final sentence is borrowed from Dr Zhivago, the memorable words uttered to the young girl who plays the balalaika so beautifully: "It's a gift, then". In between these traditional and intriguing bookends is the story of one family, the Keanes, and a community, their parish on Long Island, New York.
The novel is very ambitious, dealing with many characters over a long period of time. It opens in the late 1940s, when Mary Keane is a young typist, and closes sometime in the 1970s. The stories of Mary Keane, to a lesser extent that of her husband John and those of their four children, is recounted in detail, everyone receiving their share of attention. Jacob, the eldest boy, is drafted to Vietnam, and dies there, in the novel's great but understated moment of tragedy. Michael, his brother, is one of the lucky ones who doesn't pull the short straw (the Vietnam draft was organised by lottery). He stays home and goes to college. It is he who gives us a sociological summary of all the Keanes' lives: "In college, Michael Keane was given to saying that if they were not exactly the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class parents and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges all across the state, they were close enough. They were out to be teachers, most of them . . .". Annie, the bookish one, escapes the mediocre colleges and goes to an old English university, unnamed but apparently Oxford or Cambridge - the section describing her experiences there is riveting.
While McDermott seems to be very deliberately telling the tale of an entire family, in its intertwining, sometimes confusing, complexity, her favourite child is the youngest, Clare, who comes close to being the novel's heroine. Clare is born during the storm at the start of the book; her birth is surrounded by mystery. A supernatural figure taking the form of a fireman appears to her mother shortly before the birth; his intervention allows Clare's safe passage into the world at a dangerous time. There is a question mark surrounding her paternity, as far as I can see: a mystery about her, which the author, typically, does not resolve, although she drops a few very subtle hints, musical in nature. Clare grows up to be very likeable with saintly, innocent, qualities. She is a Cordelia; she loves like salt, but her honesty is not always rewarded.
The story of the Keane family is interesting in itself, but the most significant thing about them is their ethnic background: they are Irish-American Catholics. McDermott, from this background herself, has emerged, over the last decade, as chronicler-in-chief of this particular group. Her literary impulse is matched by an ethnological one, and she paints a full picture of the detail of everyday life in the community under scrutiny. Nuns, priests, rosary beads, holy pictures, raffles, school uniforms, Hail Marys, the five Glorious mysteries, penny candles, abound in her pages.
This is an aspect of her writing which we - the Irish who stayed at home - may find hard to take. And indeed she lays it on with a shovel occasionally. But the main problem we may have is that she is describing, indeed honouring, a way of life which Irish writers have abandoned, in what was perhaps a necessary project as the country was dragged gnashing its selfrighteous teeth into the 21st century. Now, Irish writers of McDermott's age more or less ignore all that religious side of life, even when writing about the recent past in which it was central. Or else they satirise it or rage against it. (The only writers I can think of who have worked a similar vein to McDermott's are Maeve Binchy, up to a point, and James Ryan, in his novels of the Irish in England ). Alice McDermott has no agenda. She simply describes the Catholic way of life, acknowledging the real piety which went with the rituals: Mary Keane, for instance, desires to be a good human being. Clare Keane succeeds in being one, blessed as she is by storms and supernatural firemen. And being good is what it was supposed to be about, after all, something which it is very easy to forget in this secular age.
McDermott is not sentimental. Problem areas are noted. Braver than Dáil Eireann, she tackles the abortion issue. Still, it is revealing that the girl who suffers the novel's abortion is Italian, not Irish. Otherwise, the question is discussed in a classroom debate, with a nun taking one side and the head of the debating team the other. McDermott, the cool-eyed ethnologist, simply reports what they say.
She does, however, criticise one aspect of the convent point of view, in a scene which is as close as she comes to being negative about the church (just like a real Irish writer). The nuns are against abortion; still, when a student becomes pregnant, and wants to stay that way, she has to get out. "It would be both a humiliation for Clare and a mockery of all the school stood for to have her appear in uniform in her eighth or ninth month . . . She could take her finals at home."
You need say no more than that. And McDermott is, throughout the novel, a mistress of the understatement, indeed of the non-statement. Vast swathes of the characters' experiences are left unaccounted for. The reader is left with plenty to speculate about. Written in accessible, somewhat humourless, prose, the novel never patronises.
Sometimes a writer hits gold by discovering something novel, by inventing a new world. (well . . . Harry Potter?) Sometimes the jackpot is what is going on right under their nose. Alice McDermott chronicles, with love and knowledge, the mundane experience of her own people. Their story is as ordinary as bacon and cabbage - and as extraordinary, as deeply tragic and mysterious, she seems to be saying, as King Lear or Dr Zhivago. This old, shabby territory of convent schools and church halls has become her fictional world. And suddenly it looks fascinating, brand new, gleaming.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer. Her next novel, A Fox, a Swallow, a Scarecrow, will be published by Blackstaff Press in the autumn
After This By Alice McDermott Bloomsbury, 279pp. £10.99