Switching Alices

Switching Alices, and setting aside Alice Munro's Collected Stories to read Alice McDermott's novel Someone - this month's book-group selection. Just about 40 pages in but this is clearly the turf that McDermott has staked out as her own: Irish-Catholic families in the NYC boroughs, working-class, intelligent, often set - as this appears to be - in the 1930s (although her first great novel, That Night, set in an LI suburb - among the children of the characters in the novels she was yet to write, in a sense) - Someone centered on a woman seemingly looking back on her childhood - we're not sure yet from what vantage point - and recalling a few incidents or moments largely unremarkable in themselves - sitting on the front steps waiting for her father to come home from work (she's 7), another scene about 10 years later involving her brother showing off his knowledge at the dinner table - parents greatly encouraging him in his studies, mother extremely strict and rigid, father distant but beloved by daughter. Clearly, we're in an American version of Joyce, in fact a female-centered version of Joyce - the father taking the daughter out for "some air" and slipping off into a speakeasy for a quick drink; the daughter with weak eyes, in fact seeming to be near blindness at time; the son seemingly bound for the seminary or maybe an academic world - will these children feel from the orbit of the family and the neighborhood, as Stephen Dedalus does, or are the ties tighter for women, or for Americans? I hope that the novel as it move forward will develop these themes and will have more dramatic incidents rather than the somewhat flat depiction of daily life in this neighborhood; on the positive side, from first 40 pages, McDermott includes some terrific perceptual descriptions, in particular of how a young and nearly blind child perceives interior light.