The short, dark works of Alice McDermott

These Short, Dark Days, her story in the current New Yorker, pretty much sums it up for the world of Alice McDermott - she's a writer of darkness and gloom, a NYC author who sees the city like few others, from the outer boroughs, the Irish families with their tight bonds and family secrets and lives of suffering and sacrifice and the omnipresence of the church. She's not a fun novelist and rarely a funny novelist but she has captured, or maybe created, a world of fiction all her own and can stand among the best of the sub-cultural novelists: her world is as delineated and fully conceived as Erdrich's, her near contemporary, Roth's, O'Connor's - to name just 3 seemingly different novelists. This story is her work in miniature: a 30-something man (Irish-American, in one of the NYC outer boroughs, not named), alone after his wife goes off to buy groceries, on a drizzly and gray February late-afternoon, barricades their small apartment, turns loose the gas, and lies down to die. The gas accumulates leading to an explosion - nobody seriously hurt - but they find his body on the bed. It's obvious that he committed suicide - a sin! - but some of the rescue crew and, in particular, a 60-something nun from a nearby convent who wanders by and knows she can help, assure the widow that it was an accident and he can be buried in hallowed ground. As it happens, that assurance was premature, the funeral director cannot comply, and we learn in a very brief coda that his daughter (wife was pregnant at time of husband's death) never found her father's grave site. Much of the story centers on the nun, Sr. St Savior (the daughter is named for her) and on the petty bickering and political maneuverings in the convent - subject perhaps for an adjacent novel (I don't think this story is part of a novel, but can't be sure). What's mostly striking is the overall mood, fatalism and darkness, the world is place of weary and difficult trials through which we must pass on our way toward salvation, or not. The one weakness of the story is the blankness at its heart - it's never exactly clear or even credible that the husband would kill himself (he has lost his job as a subway conductor because he refuses to work to someone else's schedule - what kind of personality is that? - seems McDermott's attempt to step aside from the cliche of alcoholism?), much less in such an orchestrated manner that could truly have killed many people along with him. But maybe his blankness is shrewd author's strategy, to keep the focus not on the "event" of the story but on the aftermath and the lives touched peripherally, and even across time.