McDermott's great re-creation of a lost world, and a correction to yesterday's post

Well, mea culpa mea maxima culpa but a big correction to yesterday's post re Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour (2017): Mr. Costello is still married, not a widower, as he and Annie are having their love affair, which of course changes a lot. His wife is mortally ill, mentally and physically unsound, and the nuns are caring for her daily - and the protagonist, Sally, Annie's daughter (and the narrators' mother) - has in fact helped care for her as she considers joining the order of nuns. I had thought she had died before her husband, the local milkman, and Annie had begun their relationship (in fairness, much of the novel is told out of sequence, which does make it a little hard to follow, but it's still on me). So now it becomes evident why Sally is so upset and mortified when she comes home unexpectedly and sees that her mother is in a relationship w/ Mr. Costello - which leads to her leaving home to board w/ the Tierneys, whose son, Patrick, she will eventually marry. It also leads to the dramatic climax of the novel, which I won't spoil, but which entails Sally's doing something desperate and reckless to, as she puts it, save her mother's soul while losing her own. Not all readers will buy that, but McDermott does know how to bring her plot to the boiling point. All told, this is a great depiction of a time and place and community that today barely exists; it's also, without feeling heavy-handed or smothered in research, gives the best account I've ever read of the life of a small convent of urban nuns and a powerful appreciation of the work these women pursued every day to help the impoverished in their community, long before there was any government so-called safety net or any type of public social services. Those who long for the days before Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, Social Security, DCYF and case workers, CHIPs, SNAP, and so on - take a look at the world McDermott re-creates and see if things were better for the poor and the outsiders, and then think again.

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