It’s hard to believe but seldom does a week go by here in America without some news story or other referring to Irish or Irishness. A recent book on Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan not only commended their ability to work together but noted that both were Irishmen.
Terry McAuliffe, currently a candidate for governor of Virginia, is not only a pal of Bill Clinton’s; he’s an Irishman. What the ethnic label means is not easy to determine, partly because it doesn’t always mean the same thing. But part of the difficulty, too, is that there aren’t all that many resources out to help think about the label and its social and cultural implications.
That sounds like a dismissal of, for one thing, American-Irish literature, and obviously to overlook Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara and James T Farrell, say, would be pretty foolish. Maybe the problem is that this literature hasn’t managed to find its canonical niche, certainly not in Irish writing. Yet, it is a literature that has by no means confined to the achievements of the three notable names just mentioned, as the works over the past 20 or 30 years of such writers as Mary Gordon, Maureen Howard and Alice McDermott demonstrates – in fact, since the second World War the most consistent authors of American-Irish fiction have been women. These three authors are actually more subtle and complicated than their male predecessors in the ways they align ethnicity, assimilation and the larger, though also more intimate, human challenge of being at home in the world.
And for a sympathetic understanding of that subtle and complex alignment it would be hard to beat Alice McDermott's quietly masterful Someone, not just because of its treatment of Marie Commeford, the protagonist, but in the ways her life story is predominantly hers alone, essentially unaffected by her native place, which happens to be Brooklyn rather than America as such.
Marie is a nobody. We don’t even know her maiden name. Both her parents are Irish-born and have reached lace-curtain status unlike her father’s “shanty” cousins, who remain very much off-stage. Her father dies young. Her brother, Gabe, goes on for the priesthood. She wears glasses, and seems somewhat mousey. School doesn’t mean a lot to her and she has no great ambition. Not even Manhattan attracts her. Is she an American at all, one wonders, so immune does she appear to the myth and the multitude? The Twenties, into which she’s born, do not seem to roar for her or for her surroundings.
She grows up living within herself; interestingly resistant to fabricated identities and fashionable mores, refusing even her mother’s cooking lessons and generally showing a capacity for reacting like “a bold piece” when her psychic space is threatened. Apartment and neighbourhood living conditions are such that perhaps psychic space is all that one can call one’s own. She falls in love and has her 17-year-old heart broken by gimpy Walter Hartnett who throws her over for Judge Sweeney’s daughter, a leg-up in class for Walter, though it’s a classless move (he hopes to appease Marie by buying her a nice lunch).
Eventually she goes to work for Fagin the undertaker. Her job is to be mourners’ “consoling angel”, and in this position her human qualities of tact, sympathy and grace come to the fore. At the same time, she discovers her sexuality and, up to a point, is a consolation to lonely servicemen (like many of the novel’s unobtrusive resonances, there’s no sense here of those who served in the second World War comprising “the greatest generation”, as the American culture of winners above all has dubbed them; it’s sufficient that they were equal to the task).
Marie marries one of them, Tom Commeford. She nearly dies having their first child, but goes on against advice to have three more. She moves to Queen’s. “Birth, and copulation, and death./That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks”. For once, TS Eliot’s lines seem to sum up a character. But that is not quite all there is to Marie. Flesh though Marie knows herself to be – and as such finds her life between worldly Tom and spiritual Gabe – she does consist of more than her physique. Her sight is poor, but she sees the light. And no opportunity is lost of letting light in. As befits McDermott’s restrained method and limited material, this light is no epiphanic gleam, nor is it heaven’s radiant beam. This is the light of common day, nothing necessarily remarkable but worthy of notice for the lustre it adds to anonymous moments and restricted interiors, human and architectural; a gratuitous, unpredictable glow, less a grace earned than a grace that’s in the nature of things. Marie absorbs the lift this element can give to the “steady weight” of her average days.
Her doing is one of the ways she’s entitled to the label “little pagan”. And she is no conventional Catholic either. Undertaker Fagin says that “the damn church is blind to life”, but the thought really expresses Marie’s outlook. In this regard, as in many others, she tacitly avoids orthodoxy and the clannishness with which it is so often in social partnership. She is neither for or against the church; she is neither pro nor con her lace-curtain heritage (of which McDermott has become something of a not uncritical laureate). She is attached to where and what she comes from, but those legacies do not determine who she is, a relevant point in an ethnic context, bearing in mind the stereotypes that wish to keep immigrants in their place. Her place is Brooklyn: even her dying, Clare-born mother wants no other home. There Marie becomes as free as she needs to be, and has no need to be a Huckleberry Finn about it.
Ultimately, perhaps, there is something of an air of romance about a character whose obligations are essentially of her own choosing. But, with the help of McDermott’s plain and effortless prose and the seamless crochet-work of her narrative structure, that air is finely dispersed, leaving the reader to enjoy the thoughtful, appealing and culturally noteworthy story of someone whose anonymity is not to be taken for granted.
George O'Brien's latest work is The Irish Novel 1960-2010.
