The darkest of all Irish writers?

Finished part 1 of Alice McDermott's troubling novel Someone, troubling because she depicts such a world of suffering and sorrow - in this relatively short section (80 pages or so), the narrator Marie, who is now we see from several flash forwards a mother and perhaps a happy and successful person, reflecting back - for some reason - on her childhood and her youth - tells of nothing but mistery - and not the abject misery of poverty and deprivation and abuse that is the staple of so much fiction and, even more so memoir, but the sorrows of ordinary life; McDermott's territory is the Irish-Catholic (though changing) neighborhoods of Brooklyn in the early to mid 20th century. In the span of these pages tells of the death of her mother (and of the difficulties of caring for her aging mother in the small, run-down roach-infested apartment that her mother won't leave, even though the neighborhood is now dangerous and the house infested), the sudden death of her father that left the young Marie in misery (the death barely explained - seen only from the view of a very young child; we suspect that alcohol may have been a huge factor), two courtship marriages each horrible - one that the young girl and her friends see from their vantage, an unattractive young woman in the neighborhood marries and it lasts only a day - the rumor is that the groom was a woman in disguise playing a terrible, mean trick - that's probably not the case, but it gives us a sense of the darkness and suspicion, especially around sex, that infests this community. The most significant courtship is Marie's relationship with Walter, a neighborhood guy who is horribly cruel and abusive to her - almost beyond comprehension, really. The story of Walter was excerpted in the New Yorker, and was pretty powerful as a standalone - within this novel it still kicks you right to the solar plexus, but also makes you wonder - who really behaves like this (among other things, asking a girl out for dinner in order to tell her hes marrying someone else mainly because she's prettier and richer - and he's doing the right thing for his someday-to-be children - "don't you agree?"). McDermott has a dark view of the world - darker than Joyce or Beckett or Trevor or O'Brien or any of the great Irish storytellers of the past 100 years - although maybe there will be some uplift as we move toward the present; as Marie's brother - himself suffering as someone who left the seminary because it "wasn't for him" (why not? - another repressed sexual message here? - McDermott hints but doesn't say, yet) - says to her, "someone" will love her - giving the novel it's title. Who will that be? We, the readers? God?