Alice McDermott's intimate character study Someone is the latest in a line of works, including her National Book Award-winning Charming Billy and At Weddings and Wakes, that should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the 20th-century Irish-American experience.
Someone is an episodic journey through the life of Brooklyn-born Marie that spans from the eve of the Great Depression almost to the end of the century. Plagued by poor eyesight from birth, Marie is a "shy child and comical-looking," overshadowed by her intense, intellectual older brother, Gabe, who is destined for the priesthood, a vocation he inexplicably abandons. Marie is a dutiful daughter and eventually a devoted wife and mother of four children. But she possesses an independent streak that surfaces in her comical rebellion against her mother's efforts to teach her how to make soda bread. "Once you learn to do it," she protests, "you'll be expected to do it."
Marie seasons her first-person account with memorable supporting characters: a Syrian-Irish woman with the improbable name of Pegeen Chehab; Bill Corrigan, a man blinded in a World War I gas attack, who serves as the "umpire" of the neighborhood stickball games; and a compassionate funeral director named Fagin who hires Marie to serve as the "consoling angel" to grieving families. Incidents like an accidental death, a suicide and a shocking revelation that follows the wedding night of a teacher from the neighborhood ensure the novel never loses its narrative momentum.
McDermott shows how the simple people who populate this working-class world deal humbly and honorably with the inevitable reversals and tragedies of life, and invests their stories with a quiet dignity and, in their best moments, transforms them into something approaching heroism. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer