Weddings and Funerals - Someone

Part 2 of Alice McDermott's novel Someone includes this: the first section leaps forward in time, not to the present but probably to about the 1960s (we don't know for precisely what vantage the narrator, Marie, is telling her story), when Marie is a mother of four happily married to a solid and devoted guy, and she wakes up one morning with serious eye problems - when we first meet her as a 7-year-old child she had eye problems as well, and husband takes her to doc and to hospital where she has eye surgery (retina detachment, it would seem) and is blind for two weeks - so much of this book is about darkness, literal and figurative. We can tell it's the 60s or so in part because of the time markers from Marie's childhood and also the idea that she'd be in the hospital for two weeks of recuperation - today? - two hours maybe? Still, the difficulty of figuring the precise time of the sections of this narrative, which freely jumps about in time for no particular reason, is puzzling - McDermott guides us primarily by historical details rather than descriptive details - the scenes of Marie's Brooklyn childhood could be almost any time within the pas 100 years, except that her father stops into a speakeasy for a drink - OK, that sets the time as Prohibition Era, but it's odd because all of McDermott's scenes, including the Long Island suburban scenes from most of her other fiction, feels quaint and old-fashioned and socially insular. The other part of section 2 of Someone shows us Marie's first job after high school, working in Fagin's funeral parlor - which actually brings her out of her shyness and her shell - as she begins dating a lot of guys (soldiers home on leave or about to go off to war - her brother, Gabe, soon to serve overseas as well) - and even to recover from her cruel mistreatment at the handds of Walter Hartnett - but still, this novel is so imbued with darkness and death that even the light and uplifting scenes take place at a funeral parlor. I am waiting for the plot to focus and cohere - and I think McDermott is best at depicting the scenes of her own childhood and adulthood - it's more of a stretch for her to go back to what may be her parents' childhood world (cf. Toiban's novel on similar grounds, Brooklyn)  but that said there are some fine scenes in this novel and it is holding my interest.