Someone by Alice mcDermitt

Trite – banal – boring. That about sums it up.

I certainly thought I recognized the author’s name when the book was passed out for out Library Book Club.  When I went to the “Also By” page in front, however, I didn’t know any of the titles.  She’s had a book published every five years since the nineties.  I’ve kept track of most everything I’ve read since about then and not a wisp of her.

Probably like most readers, for each one I finish, there are three others where I either browse a few lines here and there, or take out (or buy) and then stop after a chapter or two.  I think Alice McDermott falls in the latter category.  I’d bet there’s one of her books on my bookshelf with a dog-ear, 40 pages in.

For me, this was a bad retro rewrite attempt at Betty Smith’s, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”    There was nothing new in “Someone”.    No sparkle   –   I wanted Gene Kelly and Frankie out “On The Town”. 

No hopes, no dreams – a funeral parlor?   I get that this was sort of her idea, just someone, nobody special.  But there’s a reason successful authors write about special people  --  it’s interesting ! ! ! or at least entertaining.  This book was neither.

The writing was sophomoronic – she used all the [see my opening line] gimmicks taught in memoirs IA.  This works if the author can balance achieving disbelief (in her remembering all these “growing up” images) with the sorts of things a child remembers (p.47 – “There was a tall brown dresser against one wall, Mr. Hanson’s doorman’s cap on top of it and, between two windows, a dressing table with perfume bottles and jars of cream and a silver-backed brush still threaded with Mrs. Hanson’s black hair.”) age 9.

Quite often I am known to suggest that an author had a great short story, but then the publisher made them expand it into a novel for commercial reasons.  Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t.  In McDermott’s case, I fear she wrote an epic novel to start with and the publisher kindly chopped the middle of it out.  What’s left is a two-part book – both parts short stories – fictionalized memoirs.  Well, maybe not so fictionalized.  McDermott is at that age where one has to start dealing with the aging and death of parents. 

That’s probably where all these themes in this current book are coming from. 

Maybe it’s not fiction at all.