You’ll find yourself reading every single word of Alice McDermott’s new novel, her third, not because it’s complicated but because such wonderful things happen deep inside the sentences. On the surface, all is placid: McDermott guides us gently through a year or so in the life of an Irish-American family on Long Island, pausing now and then to dwell on a September morning in parochial school, or a long summer day in a Brooklyn apartment full of relatives. There’s a wedding, which we attend, and a death, which we know of mostly from the aftershocks. And yet- “At Weddings and Wakes " is as dense with activity as a green lawn at eye level.
When the three small children and their mother travel by bus and subway to their grandmother’s apartment, for instance, every step of the journey shimmers on the page in summer’s heat. “Up now, another flight of dirty stairs, " writes McDermott, in a passage typical for its beautifully honed minutiae. “Though they still chewed their gum, it cracked now with the fine black (or so they imagined the color) pieces of grit that the subway’s constant underground breeze had slipped between their lips, and when, at another corner, their mother held out a tissue and her cupped palm they placed the small flavorless pebbles of gum in it without protest. " Here and elsewhere, no single viewpoint presides: now we see the children through the eyes of the other subway passengers, now from the viewpoint of an aunt who adores them. This fluid world, pulsing all around us, is McDermott’s subject; and it’s addictive. It’s hard to lift your eyes at the end of the book.
