Alice McDermott, Child at Heart
Dave Weich, Powells.com
In 1998, Alice McDermott's fourth novel, Charming Billy, surprised the literary world by capturing the National Book Award. Few doubted that McDermott deserved the prize and the readership it would deliver — she's also been nominated for two Pulitzers and another N.B.A. — but A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe's 727-page tome, was generally presumed to be a shoo-in for the prize.
 In some respects, beating out Wolfe offered an incisive clue about her success. Book after book, McDermott does more with less. In her novels it's often what isn't on the page that tells you what you need to know about the characters and their stories. Salon.com marveled at Charming Billy: "There are no explosive confrontations, no charged recriminations. Yet the drama is enormous, arising from the tension of what isn't said."
Since her debut, A Bigamist's Daughter, reviewers have been calling McDermott's fiction "prismatic." And it's true: the force of her writing rarely hits you directly, but rather through the accumulation of precise, stunning details delivered in immaculately crafted phrasings. "Such wonderful things happen deep inside the sentences," Newsweek raved of her third novel, At Weddings and Wakes.
All this and I haven't yet mentioned That Night, where I first encountered her fiction. The book was then, and remains now, perhaps the most dead-on portrait of suburban childhood naivety I've read.
Now she gives us Child of My Heart, a deceptively simple story about one fifteen-year-old girl's summer on the east end of Long Island. "McDermott is something of a specialist in the literature of wry sorrow — she's Irish, after all," Ron Charles noted in The Christian Science Monitor. "Her previous novel, Charming Billy, described a lovable alcoholic who could never marry the woman he loved. She's not far from that theme in Child of My Heart, but this time she's wound sorrow tightly around a spine of resilience to produce a story that's more profound and unsettling."
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"This may well be McDermott's finest achievement... Child of My Heart is a book of astonishing craft and enormous heart." Beth Kephart, Book magazine
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Winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction. "Eloquent... heartbreaking... McDermott is brilliant. " New York Times Book Review
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"A beautifully wrought novel...about all families and all families' encounters with love, morality, and sorrow." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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"Out of suburban violence and a sense of loss by separation, McDermott has wrought a miracle, one that is enhanced even more in its telling. Her feat is remarkable." Michael J. Bandler, Chicago Tribune
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"McDermott sounds like anything but a first-time novelist. She writes with assurance and skill, and she has created a fascinatingly prismatic story." Anne Tyler, New York Times Book Review
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"McDermott elucidates all that changes and all that endures with wondrous specificity and plentitude of heart." Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
Dave: The
description of the subway through the children's eyes that starts At
Weddings and Wakes is such a compelling opening sequence; we're immediately drawn
in. In that novel, we witness five women's lives from the not-so-informed perspective
of three children. It's an alien universe, not just the subway, but the whole adult
world.
In Child of My Heart, one child, Theresa, tells the story. She's also on the outside of adult society looking in, but
the story she tells is her own. In many ways, Child
of My Heart is your most traditional book.
McDermott: I don't know that I'm ever that self-conscious about my
intent, but I was aware that this was going to be a more straightforward, traditional
story, a story in a tradition of coming-of-age stories: The plucky and beautiful
heroine, over the course of a single summer — that sort of thing. And of course
the challenge you set up for yourself is: Can I do all that and still tell a
story that hasn't been told before?
I wrote this book very quickly — for me, it's very quick — and I
wrote it without much planning. I'd been working — and I'm still working
— on another novel. I took that pause in daily life that we all took after
September 11th, and when I went back to work I just felt that I had to do something
new. What form it was going to take I didn't know.
I wrote quickly, almost in a single breath, with an awareness that it would
be in a traditional form. In some way it allowed me to be in touch with a lot
of books that meant a lot to me — and still mean a lot to me. The development
was almost without forethought. It came as a voice. I'm going to hate to sound
like I'm channeling or anything, but different books develop in different ways.
Maybe this was just a lament in response to what we were all feeling; this is
the way my lament took form.
Dave: A lot has been made of what doesn't get drawn out in the
story. One reviewer basically said, "She skipped the most important parts!"
But that was kind of the point, I gather.
McDermott: Yes.
Dave: As if maybe you didn't realize you were skipping those scenes.
McDermott: Exactly.
Dave: Still, that line of criticism led me to wonder: What was the
book about for you?
McDermott: The story arises from the voice of a girl who refuses to
be reconciled to some simple truths about relationships and how we live
and die. The world as Theresa sees it is
not acceptable to her. In her own way, she remakes it.
She certainly remakes it for the children who are in her care. And the fact
that she is caring, I think, is part of that. Her sympathies for all
of us are tremendous. And that's why she tells the story.
I suppose, honestly, without trying to sound self-inflated, it's a book about
art, why we need it, and what the impulse to make it involves: incredible selfishness
and incredible generosity. Theresa has both those things. As she says herself
when she's observing the real artist in the book, the painter, it involves a
certain dissatisfaction with the way things are. You remake the world so that
it's more to your liking. She's a lonely child who at fifteen has probably read
too much, but she sees that as a way of remaking the world.
Dave: You show virtually nothing of what becomes of her after this
summer.
McDermott: No. She pretty much dismisses it as irrelevant. There are
a couple of indications that she gives which the careful reader might or might
not pick up: She talks about her relatives who were entranced by her beauty
and discussed whether she had some French blood up until the time she was in
her thirties. And she mentions that both she and her cousin Bernadette are alone
in their beds when they recall Daisy.
I think that's enough. Where she's working and who she's dating and how her
landlord is treating her doesn't seem relevant to the story she needed
to tell, and as I say that's the "in one breath" aspect of the story: just these
few days, just these few moments that have dissipated into memory.
Dave: You mentioned some other books being there as guides or inspirations.
Were those books that you read when you were younger?
McDermott: Formative things, yes. If I think about the obvious ones — Theresa
is reading Return
of the Native throughout the story as she tells it. She refers to A
Midsummer Night's Dream and of course to Macbeth.
There's Gatsby in there. There's Lolita in there. As I say, it's sort of a tip of the hat (on my part moreso than hers)
to something enduring.
Dave: Your novels describe a culture that if not gone is certainly
disappearing. Maybe because I was at my parents' house in Massachusetts for
Thanksgiving when I was reading Child
of My Heart, I thought, No one in an Alice McDermott novel ever flies
in for the holidays. McDermott: Not yet.
Dave: But it's true. These are very enclosed worlds. Families. You've
developed a vivid fictional universe in mid- to late-century Brooklyn and Long Island. Will you
continue to set your stories there, in that familiar space and in that same
time, the years of your youth?
McDermott: I think place and time for me is often a matter of convenience,
something I can use to another end rather than something I'm trying to define
because it's somehow fascinating to me in itself. It's more what the place can
do for the larger goals I have for the work.
I have characters or narrators that are looking back through time, seeing
things in a new way. I want to capture the sense not so much of the place itself — because I'm not all that precise and accurate about place — but
more the sense of a place seen in retrospect. And the role of memory, the relation
of memory to storytelling, to faith, to mythmaking. Those are the things that
interest me, and that I hope that the work eventually seems to be more about
than the particulars.
Dave: You could apply that statement to any of your books, but it seems
especially relevant to Charming
Billy. The whole book is about myth and faith and storytelling.
McDermott: Absolutely. And who remembers what, and how it gets told.
Child of
My Heart is much more direct. This is a narrator who's really telling her
own story, but also telling it from a distance. It's not an as-it-happens narration.
So I suppose what I'm hoping is that there's at least a sheen of not just nostalgia
but manipulation. Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories
told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested
in that. Even if the storyteller seems to be more up-front, telling the story
all in one breath — "this is what happened" — it seems to me that
the distance, the fact that the narrator is looking back over time, changes
how the story should be perceived.
Dave: Prior to Richard
Ford's visit in February, I'd read an interview in which he said that he
wants readers to read his stories and his sentences exactly as he means
them. He wants readers to "think exactly what I imagine they would think," he
said.
You take care to describe things at such a granular level and your sentences
seem to be so carefully crafted. Is your writing style the result of a particular belief
about fiction or rather would you say that you don't know any other way to do
it?
McDermott: Oh, I could always write badly! No, I'm kidding. But the
reason I read fiction is much the same reason I write it: I'm fascinated by
the way language is used.
I don't just want a story. We're bombarded with stories. Everybody's got a
good story. The six o'clock news has a good story just about every night. Orpah
has lots of stories. Story is one thing, but that's not what I go to literature
for. I go for that line-by-line, felicitous use of language to another end than
simply telling me what happened to somebody at some time in their life.
I wouldn't want to spend the energy just telling a story. I've got to hear
the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary
things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language
with which they're described. That's what I love when I read. It's too much
work just to tell a story; there's not enough reward in it. The reward is when
you know you've labored to make the best use of language you possibly can.
The idea of precision, though, is sort of interesting. On the one hand I want
the language to be right. On the other hand I don't want to grab my reader by
the back of the neck and say, "See, this is what I mean." Although there are
moments when I regret that I didn't — when you see wild misinterpretations
or careless readings of something you hoped had been written carefully. But
I'd rather take that risk. I'd rather hope the spell of the language is somehow
sufficient.
I guess this is what I love about poetry, too: when you can get beyond that
what does it mean and simply experience the language in a way that can't
be described. That's the whole point. We don't have the means to fully explicate
everything we think and feel and experience. Language is just an attempt —
an attempt that's usually doomed to failure, but sometimes it can rise above its own
failure, and you can't pin down exactly how or why. A perfect poem you can't
pin down and say, "This is exactly what it meant to me." It's not a self-help
manual. I guess I hope that fiction sometimes can do that, too, that you can
sink into the spell of the story and not have to do socioeconomic analysis in
order to find out Why did I read that? Dave: When Ann Patchett published Bel
Canto, she admitted that it was the first time she managed to write using
"a truly omniscient third person narrator." She had tried with previous books
and failed; and each time she wound up going in a different direction, using
a different narrative strategy.
You have five novels now, each of which is different than the one before.
Looking back on them, do you see particular growth here or there as a writer?
Do you feel like you've been able to achieve more as you've gone along?
McDermott: Gosh, no. Every time I start anything new, I guess I feel
more like a novice. I don't feel like I've accrued any benefits from anything
I've done. Each story has to find its own way to be told, and that is exclusive
to the story, so when you're finished with one, you're starting all over again.
Or should be, I guess. I don't think any of us want to repeat ourselves.
In some ways, I guess it keeps me forever young because every time I'm confronted
with something new I feel that I have no idea how to do this.
Dave: I'm flipping through my old copy of That
Night, which was assigned to me in a graduate school English course seven
or eight years ago, and I'm looking at a comment I made in the margin of page
160. The line goes:
"So what are they going to do to me?" Rick said, as if he were prepared
for an easy fistfight. "What are they going to charge me with?"
"Melodrama," the lawyer said. Hoods he could handle. "Making a scene. Stupidity.
The whole damn neighborhood saw you."
I wrote in the margin: "The paradox of this novel: how to write a novel obsessed
with melodrama without being melodramatic."
McDermott: [Laughing] Good point! That line comes back to me,
but I would have had a hard time telling you what page it was on.
I think that being a writer at all probably indicates in most of us a certain
contrariness, and part of my contrariness has been to write about things I probably
shouldn't because they are melodramatic or clichéd or the characters are stereotypes,
such as in Charming
Billy. Or even with Child
of My Heart: yet another coming-of-age story with a plucky, beautiful heroine
that takes place over a few days in summer after which nothing was ever the
same. If I had any brains at all, I'd say, "I'm not touching that!"
What happens to me time and again is that the stuff I say I shouldn't touch,
I say, "Well, but I'm going to do it like nobody's ever done it." With that
incredible hubris we need. So I guess in a way, yes, that's very true, and I
guess it's this belief of mine that the language can redeem anything. The language
can make us see anew anything, if it's right. And if it's done with care.
Dave: Jeffrey
Eugenides was here recently. One reviewer called his new book, Middlesex,
one of the best novels of the past decade, alongside The
Corrections and Underworld.
I thought, Okay, well, I now have an idea of what this reviewer considers
quality fiction. But implicit in his statement is the idea that very big,
epic novels are best. As someone who doesn't write gigantic, seven hundred page
tomes, what do you think? What are the best novels for you? What are the most
affecting?
McDermott: Oh, my goodness! Some very big, epic novels. Middlemarch is a pretty good novel that I think had an influence on me. Anything by Charles
Dickens is probably okay.
We're such kids. We really are. And often, I think, when we're trying to draw
up our lists or make judgments about things like books there's a sense of admiring
the brawn, admiring something that — and this is a term I always hear,
talking about books — something that's "totally made up." We suspect that's
probably better than something that comes from life. I don't know if it's because
we're seeing something that we're convinced we can't do and so that makes us
respect it more.
Again, being a contrarian, I'm very conscious of trying to make something
epic out of something small and ordinary. And in the long run when I'm reading
I don't really care if everything that's in the novel actually happened to the
author or never happened to the author or is made up and totally wrong, factually.
I care if I'm sucked into the spell. I care if I see things I've never seen
before or feel things I've never been able to articulate. I care if the book
works. Subject, length, setting, and author's biography seem so irrelevant to
the experience.
I think a lot of us who love books are frustrated by just that kind of guidance
from book reviewers who maybe forgot what it's like just to be sucked into the
spell of the work and need to look for those outside things. Comparing height,
like kids do. Or making muscles, one book against the other. Instead of, I
was there with that book. I was entranced. Or, It broke my heart. Or, It made me laugh. My favorite criteria is when pieces of a work of fiction — a line or
a moment — come back to you after you've read the work when you're doing
something entirely different. And I don't know how to catalog that. Does that
mean it was a smart book? Does that mean it was a brilliant writer? Somehow
I've been given a gift. Somehow my internal monologue has been enhanced by that
reading experience, and to me you can't get much better than that.
Dave: Can you think of a recent example? A line or passage that's been
stuck in your brain?
McDermott: William
Trevor's The
Story of Lucy Gault had lots of moments that came back to me after reading. [Read McDermott's review of Lucy Gault, first published in the Atlantic Monthly.]
I'm just now reading Austerlitz,
and there was just a description — I'd have to go back and try to find
it: the blue flickering of TV's, coming in on the train. Just a taste of it.
It's there. And it's sort of wonderful.
Dave: Speaking of keeping things straight in your brain: You work on
two novels at once. I can see advantages to that. For instance, if you get stuck
on one.
McDermott: Right.
Dave: But how do you balance? Do you ever feel like you're neglecting
one? How does that work?
McDermott: Well, I do sometimes feel like I've neglected one, but it's
benign neglect.
I don't work except when I'm actually working with the words. Obviously I
think about stories when I'm doing other things, but I find that when it's time
to sit down and get the writing done I don't worry much about what's not getting written. Again, I guess it's that whole idea of sinking into the spell
of the language - you hope to or try to.
Dave: When Charming
Billy won the National
Book Award your previous books began to receive a lot of attention. Awards
are like that in terms of throwing a disproportionately large readership at
authors who may have been quite deserving of an audience for a long time. Were
you surprised by the impact? You had plenty of nominations before.
McDermott: Yes, it was very surprising, but on the other hand it gives
you a wonderful perspective. The book had been out for a while. It had nice
reviews and nice sales, then the National Book Award came along. It certainly
didn't hurt that everybody thought Tom
Wolfe was going to win [for A
Man in Full]. In another year with another set of nominees it probably wouldn't
have gotten so much attention.
So it's lovely, and it's nice that something like this happens that gets your
books into the hands of many more readers, but you also realize how totally
arbitrary it is. And the thing that sort of makes me chuckle is That
Night was nominated for a lot of things. At
Weddings and Wakes just ended up on one award list. Then Charming Billy got the National Book Award. Well, now everybody's saying that At Weddings
and Wakes is clearly the best one.
Dave: I've seen that written, actually.
McDermott: You're like, Oh, go to hell! [Laughing] Nobody
was saying that at the time, when I could have used it!
Dave: Is there anything you think that I've blatantly omitted? That
people just have to know.
McDermott: I don't know. What do you think?
Dave: I don't know. I never know until it's too late and I'm transcribing.
It's not hard to describe your work, but it's somewhat hard to find comparisons.
You can bring up the Irish-American thing, and the Catholic Church, but that
doesn't speak to the style at all. There are lots of books written about Irish-Americans
or the Catholic Church and they're nothing like yours. So where does that leave
you?
McDermott: I'm finding that Child
of My Heart is a difficult book for me to talk about, and from what I'm
hearing it's a very difficult book for other people to talk about, too. I guess
because, my sense is, that the book is what it is. It's there, and it is kind
of a breathless rush. It is a lament. But I hope that it's also an offer of
strange comfort from one of us to the rest of us.
Somebody said something about it being more like a poem, and I guess if I
ever aspire to be a poet — and I have way too much respect for poets to
even think of it — going back to the idea that it's the same thing I feel
about poetry: a poem doesn't mean. In odd ways, this novel, more than anything
else I've written, is just there. It's what it is. It's a single breath. The
breath was taken and it's done.
Dave: That's an interesting comparison. Like a lot of poetry the book
can defined as well by what it omits as by what it presents, which is not typically
something you would say about a novel.
McDermott: That's right, very much so. And I think there's the assumption
in poetry that we're in this together, reader and poet. Maybe fiction is not
usually comfortable with that — the idea that somehow you, reader, will get what
I mean, without my having to footnote it all, just through the sound of the
language and the words themselves.
I guess that was my hope for this novel as well.
Alice McDermott
kindly fielded my phone call at her home on the morning of December 2, 2002.
Her son is applying to college near where I went to graduate school so we talked
a bit about state schools and triple majors before getting down to brass tacks.
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