Fiction: Alice McDermott is a diminutive woman with clear blue eyes. At 50, she could still be described as gamine. Interviews seem to paint a relentlessly ordinary picture of the author and her home life: suburban wife of a medical scientist, mother of three who prefers to stay home and drink beer to celebrate her successes, rather than going to glitzy nightspots, writes Christina Hunt Mahony.
But this writer, with two Pulitzer nominations and a National Book Award to her credit, is quite capable of holding audiences in thrall at her readings. Her story-telling skills disclose the mysteries of life in Irish America a generation or two ago. Just as one suspects that the bland descriptions of her domestic life and her protestations of limited goals for her fiction are not the whole story, her stories and novels are more complex and less wholesome than they appear to be on the the quotidian levels on which her characters interact.
McDermott's domestic fiction creeps up to the edge of the unsavoury, never opting to avoid it with the comic turn, but never pursuing it to ugly revelation. Her local drunks are not all that charming, her neglected children too forlorn for us to overlook their parents' bad behaviour. The non-linear narration she favours can secrete doubt into the deep crevices of her tales, but leaves the writer's hands surprisingly clean while the reader is left to unearth any nastiness in the garden.
McDermott has said: "I want to recreate life more as we store it, rather than how we live through it . . . Memory is where the drama is."
This in itself indicates a more subversive intention than the fiction might at first suggest. Although it was never her intention to remain exclusively within the realm of Irish America, thus far no escape route seems to have presented itself. As readers we should probably be grateful for that. Non-linear narrative always suits memoir better than the novel, and McDermott's fiction, while not autobiographical, is recording the biography of the community of which she is a member.
Irish-American fiction has always had a tendency to the gothic. There's the southern legacy of Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers. Apart from the southern strain, one can also compare McDermott's world with that of Mary Gordon's families filled with dark secrets, and with William Kennedy's exploration of local political corruption and familial ties set in Albany in its Irish-American heyday. Kennedy's gothicism manifests itself in his ghostly outcasts who act as reminders of such past glories.
Newer entrants into the field, like the infamous McCourt brothers, have mined pathos, deprivation and negative stereotype nearly to modern gothic proportions. McDermott's work is written in a more minor key, although she too has her ghosts.
Child of My Heart is, at its heart, a distasteful tale of a lower middle-class couple with a preternaturally beautiful and virtuous daughter who purposely move to a better neighbourhood to attract a better class of prospective husband for her, and to improve their own belated chances for social advancement. It's a story as old and as corrupt as it gets.
Set in the backyard banality of suburban Long Island (where McDermott was a teenager in the period in which the novel is set), with the monied classes conveniently situated down the road, her turf resembles that of Scott Fitzgerald more than it does any other Irish-American writer. There is little to differentiate her 15-year-old, virgin-mother figure, Theresa, the summer baby-sitter of the forgotten children of the rich, from Fitzgerald's initially pure, but upwardly mobile teenage boys who mimic the rich they encounter on the golf courses, nor from the forever compromised figure of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Her rich mothers have "summer dreams" which echo nicely with Fitzgerald's great short story, 'Winter Dreams', which are those of his working-class caddies.
Theresa is untainted initially, just as Nick begins in disapproval of the rich with whom he progressively spends his time by preference. She even has as her charge a doomed cousin nicknamed Daisy. However, Theresa's is a genuine coming-of-age tale, with her dawning realisation of her beauty and the power it can wield. This beauty is the subject of adult conjecture throughout the novel, and attracts a lonely, divorced doctor of middle age and a magnetic septuagenarian painter who has a whiff of Jackson Pollock about him.
Oddly, though, this ministering angel with her endless resourcefulness in soothing and feeding cranky children and ill-treated pets (there are far too many pets in this novel), with her radiance apparent to adults, toddlers and animals, exists in a world devoid of keen-sighted teenage boys or satellite girlfriends. In fact, there are none to be seen in this idyllic summer community, not even on the beaches that figure in daily outings. Although the novel pre-dates teen hangouts such as shopping malls, and no one has mobile phones, there were pizza parlours and soda fountains, and teenage girls (even if they were the product of restrictive convent schools) gabbed on phones, .
Theresa, however, inhabits a world with no female wannabes, nor catty remarks about her looks, and not a single boy delivering newspapers or mowing lawns to espy this budding beauty as she moves through the fair. The effect is distorted and prevents her emerging as the compelling character she is meant to be.
Similarly, all other families with children are hopelessly flawed: the criminally neglectful and violent Morans next door, but also her houseful of cousins in Queens (too many); the toddler who is the product of the aging painter's loins and consigned to the offhand French housekeeper; the rich townies who forbid their children pets, and the children of the doctor exiled to summer camp in Maine.
McDermott's language and style are compelling and nearly manage to dispel these anomalies. Her lazy summer, with a rhythm that today's children might find tedious, brings us back to a world where, when school was out, the hazy months ahead seemed an endless paradise of soft fruit and sand between the toes. There are no organised activities, frenetic work schedules or multi-tasking to be seen. McDermott's carefully constructed plot, with its early indications that all is not well in this carefree hiatus, leads to the inevitable sad death of a child, and the heroine's reluctant propulsion into full adult awareness.
Take it with you to the beach, and make sure the kids get sand between their toes.
Christina Hunt Mahony is the director of the Center for Irish Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. She is the author of Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition
Child of My Heart. By Alice McDermott, Bloomsbury, 242pp, £14.99