Someone by Alice Mcdermott

Ever since being stunned by the quiet elegance of Alice Munro’s writing, I have greatly admired what I call quiet writers—quiet in the sense that there is very little overt drama in their stories, no rich-famous people or earth-shattering events. Instead, the focus is on ordinary people who, when looked at carefully and with compassion, have quite extraordinary inner lives.  

In recent years Munro has been joined (or I have joined her) with other writers who write about ordinary people who become quite extraordinary when seen through the lens of a great story-teller. Elizabeth Strout is one such writer, and Alice McDermott another. Today I’m going to talk about McDermott’s newest novel, Someone. She could as well have titled it Anyone since she is so intent on describing the life of a woman others see as plain and quite uninteresting. 

Like all of McDermott’s novels, this is a story of Irish-American families living in east coast cities. We meet seven year old Marie, the lead character in this novel, sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn observing carefully, as she always does, the bustle of life going on around her. Describing herself, Marie says, “At seven, I was a shy child, and comical-looking, with a round flat face and black slits for eye, thick glasses, black bangs, a straight and serious mouth—a little girl cartoon.” From this beginning, the short novel hopscotches between descriptions of her early life as an awkward child to her old age senility, the agonizing birth of her first child, the early death of her much loved father, her loyal and devoted brother’s brief stint as a priest and the constancy of his love for Marie throughout their lives. The actual chronology of her life much less important than the stitched together frames McDermott describes for us. 

In her first foray into romance, Marie meets a man who breaks off with her as soon as he finds a woman more attractive and with better economic prospects. He says he is doing it to give his future children the best chance he can, “It’s the best-looking people that have the best chances.” Marie is not really surprised by his defection, but it is devastating nonetheless.  

I sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to take my glasses off, fling them across the room. To tear the new hat from my head and fling it, too. Put my hands to my scalp and peel off the homely face. Unbutton the dress, unbuckle the belt, remove the frail slip. I wanted to reach behind my neck and unhook the flesh from the bone, open it along the zipper of spine, step out of my skin and fling it to the floor. Back shoulder stomach and breast. Trample it. Raise a fist to God for how He had shaped me in that first darkness: unlovely and unloved.

As their Brooklyn neighborhood decays and most who can flee to the suburbs, Marie remains to care for her mother who fears a move, and finally fears even to leave her apartment in their battered brownstone. She and her brother lean on one another as they care for their widowed mother, and the quiet love they share is touchingly described, though always understated. If there is a love-angle in this novel, it is the relationship between brother and sister.

Marie is all in all a dutiful child, her teenage rebellion mild compared to most; it takes the form of refusing her mother’s attempts to teach her how to cook. “Well, I don’t want to learn.” I said. “Once you learn to do it, you’ll be expected to do it,” and was amazed at the way my own words clarified for me what had been, until then, only a vague impulse to refuse. They looked at me over their knees, this gaggle of girls; a lifetime of hours in the kitchen bearing down on us all.” 

McDermott has an incredible talent with words, moving her readers quickly from the mundane (a sight or smell) to a rich memory and a complex life. Alice Munro is asked by a journalist why she writes stories; she replies that she wants to move people—that she wants her readers to be different people after finishing one of her stories. I am certainly moved my McDermott’s stories, and I would add that I feel I am a different person after reading one of her novels. Events in this novel (and in all of her stories) are often sad, as true to life stories often are, but I have to say I feel uplifted by her stories. I feel that I have been changed for the better by having read her. 

Rather than attempting to further describe her writing, let me end with a quote. Marie and Gabe, her brother, decide to walk together after Marie’s hurtful rejection by her boyfriend, much as her father had taken long walks with her to assuage some childhood grief. 

The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal. I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief. 

Eight Girls Taking Pictures by Whitney Otto

Good morning, as you readers know, we are very fortunate to have  many fine writers in the Northwest and in particular in Portland. Today I want to talk to you about one of these local authors, Whitney Otto, and her 2012 novel Eight Girls Taking Pictures. I was fortunate to have been given the chance to read most of this ambitious book in an early draft form and then to read it again in its published form. For the second reading I adopted a method of reading that had been suggested to me by a colleague and fellow-reader, Tony Wolk. He and I are both nearly fierce admirers of the Canadian writer, Alice Munro. When Munro came out with her last collection of stories, Dear Life, Tony and I both bought it immediately. Knowing of my love for her, Tony asked me if I had immediately gobbled it up, and I confessed that I had read it all over the course of a day or two. When I turned the same question on him, he answered that he was allowing himself only one story at a time, forcing himself to read some other book between each story. I recalled having treated certain desserts like that as a child, and rather regretted not having employed a similar delaying or drawing out strategy in my own reading. 

Thus, when I got my copy of Eight Girls,  I decided to read just one section about one photographer at a time. Besides wanting to savor the stories, I had also noticed in my quicker reading of the early draft, the lives and stories of the women had run together, and I wanted to keep them distinct. I’m glad I decided on this method if for no other reason than that it did prolong the treat. Since I have also heard Whitney talk about the writing of the book, I know that she did extensive reading of her own on many of the women photographers discussed as well as a lot of historical accounts of the times in which they lived. As she says in the “Author’s Note” at the end, “This book is a work of fiction inspired by several real women photographers whose lives and work have influenced my own.” While I appreciate the author’s cautionary warning, it is obvious that she knows so much about these women and that she loves them for the struggles they went through in order to do their art. I’m impressed not only by her understanding of the lives of the women but also by her incredible grasp of the historical events that shaped their lives and the course of events in the last century. While this book could not have been written without the imaginative skill of the author, neither would it have been the fascinating and comprehensive book it is without the extensive knowledge the author has of these historical figures.

The lives of the eight woman span all of the 20^th century, and the constant theme of the stories is the incredible struggle it was for them do their art in the context of the predominantly sexist climates of the times in which they grew up. The first six stories are based squarely on the lives and works of six real-life photographers: Imogene Cunningham, Madame Yevonda, Tina Moddotti, Lee Miller, Greta Stern and Ruth Orkin, and are presented in that order although the names of the women are changed. The last two stories are based on actual photographs, but the two characters are created by Whitney Otto. Most of the eight woman   had progressive fathers or partners who encouraged them to act on their talents and passion, but, nevertheless, trying to balance their lives as daughters, spouses, mothers and artists was more than simply daunting. Even had Whitney Otto not set out to write a feminist book, it would have been impossible to study the lives of these women and their attempts to be recognized in a male-dominated profession and world and not in the end create a distinctly feminist work. I find the book to be incredibly fair and kind to the men described and yet utterly honest in describing struggles that men with similar talents and passions would not have encountered.

The first story, that of Cymbeline Kelly, begins in 1917; she has agreed to marry her photographer husband because they have promised each other not to live like everyone else. Cymbeline occurs in the eighth story as well, although at a much later age. Their promise not to live like everyone else is soon tested by children arriving and trying to balance the lives of two already successful photographers. 

I don’t intend even to  provide  a sketch of each of the eight photographers; that will be accomplished much better by reading the book, but I do want to mention a couple of the stories that particularly caught my eye due to the author’s descriptions of and understanding of the political and economic issues underlying the stories.  One is  the story of Clara Agento which provides a rich account of the leftist politics of the time and Whitney Otto’s obvious fascination with the incredible congregation of artists and writers in Mexico City many of them there to escape political persecution in their own countries. Clara’s father’s leftist politics had acquainted her with political struggles all over the world long before her eventual travels to and imprisonment in Mexico. This section of the book reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver’s fascination with Mexico as a haven for liberal and leftist artists and intellectuals in her recent novel The Lacuna, although I would say that Otto spins out her account in a less heavy-handed manner and with more attention to the sexual and artistic liberation of the community that gathered there in addition to the political struggles.

The story of Charlotte Blum is fascinating on so many levels. It begins in March of 1927 in Berlin. The author tells us that the story begins simply from the fact that Imogen Cunningham spent a year in Dresden studying photochemistry, but that everything else in that story is spun from her imagination. Two of the characters in the story open a studio that specializes in advertising photography, and the reader is given a very plausible account  of what amounts to the origins of this whole field. While I have some understanding of the political events in Germany as the Brownshirts come to power and the systematic persecution of (among others) Gypsies, Jews and homosexuals begins, I had no idea that Berlin was a sort of counter-cultural mecca in many ways. 

One painter portrayed Berlin as the vortex of three groups: the veterans of the Great War, with their missing limbs and less visible war wounds, parked on the already crowded sidewalks; the capitalists, somehow surviving the cataclysmic cost of the war, and the consequent reparations; and the prostitutes, whom one could spend the better part of an afternoon categorizing before even addressing all the sexual appetites they satisfied.  

There was something for everyone: lesbian, gay, transvestite, transsexual, with every category of “characters” and amusements. Charlotte was reminded each morning as she observed people in late-night finery on their way home, looking a little worse for wear, that the current sex industry (both its economics and its scope) was a marker of a hallowed-out nation, something that seemed to move beyond human nature. 

That’s what it was to be young and in Berlin in those years between the wars.

Berlin made you like who you were when you were there, as if everything worth being a part of the world—all hose modern ideas about sex and art and women; all that possibility—was right there, in its dark beating heart. 

I underlined so many parts of his book, was caught by so many of the descriptions of the day to day lives and struggles of these women that trying to mention each would result in disjointed and confused muddle. Whitney Otto’s account is seamless and of a whole, but don’t take my word for it, get the book and read it yourself. 

One of the last stories, that of Miri Marx, captures the inner struggles of these women so desperate to pursue their art so intimately that the reader cannot but read it as autobiographical. The spirit of the story is captured well in one line: “Meeting one’s mate, Miri thought, was really a problem when one really liked traveling alone.” But Miri decides not only to travel with her man, David, but to marry an have children. 

And this was her paradox. She wanted to be in two places at once, to be two people at the same time. If she could split herself, one Miri would be happy spending all day with her toddling children with no thought about doing anything else. They would play with toys on the floor, or she would enthusiastically read to them. Nap when they napped. Eat when they ate. Her other self would be making movies with David. Or possibly taking pictures on her own, with no lingering regret about not having children, or not being home with the children.  

It was hard not to feel resentment that men weren’t forced ino these choices. Some days she felt that she would spend all her time trying to forget the life before children because she loved them too much to be reminded of the heat of Rome in the summer and a beautiful girl who turned heads as she walked down an Italian strada. 

I loved all of these stories, and it is obvious that the author loved and admired these women. It shines forth from every page. 

To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal

Once in awhile you can choose a book for its title, and then find out that the book is even better than the title. Such is the case with Tom McNeal’s fascinating novel, To Be Sung Underwater.  The book was recommended to me by a reader friend along with a half dozen others, and it was the title that moved me to find and read this book first. I almost put the book aside after reading just a few pages when I realized that the lead character was a woman and the author a man. In my experience, male authors rarely do well with first-person narrative using the voice of a woman. This is one of those rare exceptions.

We are introduced to Judith, the lead character, when she is forty-four. She has, she supposes, a good marriage, a precocious and successful (if rather bratty) teenage daughter, and the job of her dreams as a film editor. And yet she feels oddly vacant and unfulfilled. She explains to her friend and co-worker, Lucy, how out of the blue a kind of swerve has occurred in her life. Not, I suppose, unlike the famous Epicurean swerve that Epicurus used to explain both how humans could have free will in an otherwise determined universe and also how the contra-causal swerve of a single atom had begun the formation of compounds and of the universe as we know it. “My life had utterly settled into itself and then this little…swerve occurred, or maybe I meant it to occur, maybe I’d actually plotted it out in one of those corners of your brain or heart you access only in dreams.”

Judith is renting a storage locker to store some old furniture which her husband, Malcom, thinks should be thrown out but that has great sentimental value for her. When asked to supply a name for the rental agreement, she suddenly and inexplicably decides to give a name that she has not thought of for years. The sudden out-of-the-blue giving of the name propels her back to a time when she was living with her father in Nebraska and met her first love, a boy name Willy, whom she has not seen for twenty-seven years. The reader is then taken on a journey with Judith that moves back and forth between that distant seventeen-year-old Judith and the present one.

Although billed as a love story, I see this novel more as an exploration of marriage and of the many ways marriages can go wrong, along with a gentle reminder of how it might also go right. Judith’s mother, Kathleen, has little good to say about her own marriage or about marriage in general. 

All marriages come with a pinhole leak, her mother once said. Marriages swallow love and excrete grief. Marriage is a house a woman can’t leave and a man merely visits. (Or, as a variant: Marriage is a house with a woman locked inside.)

One morning, sitting at the kitchen table—this was after Judith’s father had left them in Vermont to take a teaching position in Nebraska—her mother said to Judith, “Our marriage, like all marriages, was happy until it wasn’t.”

In many ways Judith has carefully arranged her life to counter her mother’s grim predictions, and she has done so successfully. She had a successful career, “a smart socially capable daughter, and a husband who loved her.” But she also has two secrets: one the lingering love for the boy Willy whom she left behind when she went off to college.

The other of Judith’s important secrets was her fear that she hadn’t properly inhabited her role as a mother. She knew she loved her daughter, but it was a love with a strange insulating distance built into it.

Once Judith’s parents begin to live separately, she finds herself attracted and repelled by each. While sympathetic to her mother and to her mother’s belief that her husband has simply abandoned them both, she is bothered by her mother’s attempts to befriend Judith’s young friends, “It’s like she wants to be my age.” And while her father is comfortable with the separation, admitting that he prefers to live apart, he refuses to take Judith’s side in her criticisms of Kathleen. “People separated from their spouse…they’re almost like stroke victims. They have to learn everything over again…I can tell you from personal experience that the way we get around at the beginning isn’t always pretty.”

Judith first visits her father in Nebraska simply on summer vacation, but then frustrations with school and with her mother lead her to request moving in with him for high school. It’s during this later, longer stay that she meets and falls in love with an older boy, a carpenter who is already out of school and living on his own in Rufus Sage, Nebraska. The story of their young love is beautiful and convincing on so many levels. He introduces her not only to sex and intimacy, but in important ways brings her to a new and different view of nature. Like her professor father, Judith is a reader, an intellectual, and assumes as a matter of course that she will go on to college and have a career. Willy is not a reader, and while he respects and admires Judith’s talents, he is happy and centered in his life as a carpenter. Small town life suits him well, and especially for his relatively young age, he is self-contained and comfortable with himself. 

I’m not about to reveal the twists and turns in their young love except to say that Willy is a lovely and loving young man. He seems to want Judith for just who she is; his love for her is genuine and whole. While their aspirations and dreams of the future do not neatly dovetail, this is a young man who (unlike most) is willing to follow Judith where her life takes her, and to adjust his own life to hers. 

As the so-called swerve has ripple effects on Judith’s life propelling her into first imagining and then to some extent living out an alternative life with Willy, this reader was sometimes taxed in his not quite willing suspension of disbelief. And yet, McNeal manages to create an almost believable story, and one that describes a love so much better and so much more wholesome than the possessive and narcissistic ones typical of Hollywood and pop novels. Willy is certainly the most honorable of the characters, and somehow some of his authenticity seems to rub off on others. 

I will leave you with a quote which I think sums up my appreciation of this book. The line is uttered by Kathleen, Judith’s mother, as she finds herself falling in love with Judith’s dad.

Sometimes I think of a cover of a book as a door to another world…but other times I think of it as an escape hatch from this one.’ And then she blinked and said, ‘I guess it’s the same thing.

I think you will be glad you opened this particular door.