Disappointing Alice
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Disappointing Alice Alice McDermott's new novel fails so miserably it makes her old work seem bad. BY JOHN PODHORETZ It's the nightmare dilemma for every critic: There's an artist whose work the...
...That is largely due to McDermott's powers of observation, which can turn the most prosaic moment into something sensual and mysterious...
...If you loved him, you took his car keys away, took his incoherent phone calls after midnight...
...McDermott has been a novelist of my heart since 1987, when I read her second novel, That Night, just after it was published in hardcover...
...She is deflowered by the seventy-year-old painter in one offhand paragraph...
...She makes you feel the hot air of the summer wafting across a suburban lawn, can make you see the light fading slowly just after the sun has gone down, can make you hear the gurgle of Hawaiian Punch as it is poured into a glass in a Hamptons kitchen...
...At Weddings and Wakes is a virtuoso act of indirect storytelling...
...So, too, the death of a central character in At Weddings and Wakes, and the attempted suicide of the pregnant girl in That Night...
...Charming Billy is at once the most realistic of McDermott's novels—her portrait of an incorrigible drunk is entirely unsentimental—and the most like a fairy tale...
...The book ends with an almost mystical act of reconciliation, after Billy's death, when the friend and Billy's wife marry and finally make something good out of all this sadness...
...The title character mourns a dead love, only to learn that she never actually died and that it was his closest friend who kept the secret from him...
...You saw the bloodied scraps of flesh he coughed up into his drinks...
...But then the critic attends the preview performance, or goes to a screening, or reads the new book...
...Everything we find out about the Towne sisters and the woman they call "Momma" we discover through snippets of conversation overheard from the other room, or from the backseat...
...She won a National Book Award for this layered portrait of friendship and heartbreak...
...Billy's inability to recover from his youthful passion destroys his life and adds to the torment of his long-suffering wife...
...At Weddings and Wakes concerns the tangled relations among four sisters and the stepmother who reared them—and it tells the story through the eyes of three prepubescent children who are dragged along to family events whose meaning they are too young to fathom...
...Surely the new work deserves exactly the same sort of sympathetic treatment the critic intended to give it in the first place...
...The summer ends, and so does the book...
...McDermott tries but fails to infuse the day-to-dayness of ordinary life with mythical beauty...
...After rereading That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and Charming Billy, I became even more disheartened...
...The two novels that followed over the next decade, At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy, seemed equally stunning to me...
...Charming Billy is the novel that made McDermott's name...
...Critics write about art because they love art...
...The fight that erupts transforms the neighborhood...
...duced to an artist whose work they really should know...
...But he's never had a chance to write about the artist...
...Tears sprang to my eyes the first time I read Charming Billy and discovered that it would end with the happy marriage of betrayer-friend and betrayed wife...
...McDermott writes about Irish families in and around New York City, primarily in the late 1950s and early 1960s...
...She finds herself attracted to him— perhaps because Theresa is a writer in the making and is drawn to someone who can create art out of nothing...
...We live not in a cultural wasteland, but in a time of possibility...
...Animals and children worship Theresa, who works as a babysitter for the two-year-old daughter of a septuagenarian painter and his young wife...
...But an uneasy feeling begins to set in...
...And the second is to make a convincing argument for an artist's importance...
...I have begun to see McDermott's other novels as riven with unbelievable jumps in plot and unnecessary sacrifices of characters' lives...
...If you loved him, then you told him at some point that he was killing himself and felt the way his indifference ripped through your affection...
...Perhaps he's guilty of a failure of imagination...
...But there is nothing bleak about her novels, which manage to be strangely uplifting...
...Most criticism is really nothing more than a consumer service, a means of conveying information so consumers can know whether to spend their time and money on a new work...
...Her eight-year-old cousin Daisy comes to spend the summer, leaving behind a tiny house in Queens where she lives with her parents and seven brothers and sisters...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ It's the nightmare dilemma for every critic: There's an artist whose work the critic has recommended to friends with urgent passion...
...The "charming Billy" of the title is an alcoholic who is a pleasure and a burden to everyone who knows him: If you loved him, we all knew, you pleaded with him at some point...
...And so he swallows his distaste for the new work and writes the article he intended to write...
...Daisy is dying, though no one knows this yet...
...It seemed an almost perfect book—the tale of a single incident in a Long Island subdivision in the summer of 1961 when neighborhood toughs and suburban fathers get into a fight...
...If Child of My Heart is so similar to them, what does its melodramatic falsity and icky sentimentality say about them...
...The critic may be cruel in deflation, but he is kind in celebration...
...Indeed, the failure is so profound that it led me back to the previous novels I had taken such pleasure in...
...Can there be anything more painful and depressing than falling out of love...
...Child of My Heart is a cloying mess...
...A fifteen-year-old girl named Theresa, an only child, lives in East Hampton with her lower-middle-class parents in the early 1960s...
...it is here, among us...
...It gives the men a new sense of themselves even as it reminds the women of the raw teenage passion they will never feel again and the children of the passion they will soon experience and then lose forever...
...He adduces all sorts of evidence for the power, humanity, skill, and life-affirming grandeur of the artist's work...
...There are only two circumstances under which a critic can break free from the restrictive form of a review...
...The new work doesn't seem to want to blossom...
...Child of My Heart has a great deal in common with its predecessors...
...Perhaps he's just in a bad mood or distracted...
...On second reading, that ending seems a cheap ploy—a manipulation—in light of everything else that has gone before it...
...Some rabbits are born...
...The first is to undertake the demolition of an unwarranted reputation...
...The secret gnaws away at his friend's life and helps to poison it as well...
...Such rationalization is a powerful and terrible temptation, and I have just done battle with it as I read Alice McDermott's new novel, Child of My Heart...
...Or you drove him to AA, waited outside the church till the meeting was over, and drove him home again...
...This hopeful vision is what the critic wishes to express when he takes on the task of writing about his beloved artist's new work...
...After all, why should the critic's article have to suffer because of his own failed imagination...
...A teenage girl has been impregnated by one of the boys and sent away, and the boy shows up to find out where she is from her widowed mother...
...He feels pride as the artist's fame grows, because he can congratulate himself on having been a prescient talent-spotter, a fan from the beginning...
...Or you advanced him whatever you could afford so he could travel to Ireland to take the pledge...
...You banished him from your house until he could show up sober...
...A dog bites Daisy...
...A sense of desperation comes over the critic...
...The tragedy that is to befall her only months later seems almost an afterthought, as though McDermott needed a parallel in this book to the deaths of Billy in Charming Billy and Aunt May in At Weddings and Wakes...
...Child of My Heart does not, now, seem to me to be an aberration, an unfortunate detour in the course of a brilliant career...
...We watch what happens through the eyes of the children in these families, who are witness to powerful and tragic events far beyond their immature understanding—while McDermott's adults are filled with regret and a sense of all they have lost in their lives, and the stories she tells are filled with tragic incident...
...Finally, an opportunity comes along—the writer has a new book out, or the director has a new movie out, or the choreographer has completed a new ballet—and the critic convinces an editor to use this latest work as an occasion for a comprehensive tribute to an exciting career...
...By demonstrating how large-hearted the artist is, the critic seems equally large-hearted: Art is not dead...
...For a while, the critic attentively takes note of his subject's usual touches...
...This disillusioning encounter with the work of Alice McDermott explains why it can be so difficult for a critic who finds himself disliking a new work by an artist he admires to be honest about it...
...It's not exactly lifeless, but it's not flourishing...
...If you read closely, you will find clues that the new work did not satisfy (a well-placed "while," an unflattering comparison to a previous work), but still the piece is a celebration—for at least, the critic can rationalize, people have been introJohn Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The painter is attracted to Theresa, who is a great beauty...
...The kids and the painter string lollipops through the branches of an oak to make a lollipop tree...
...Daisy is as unconvincing a sacrificial lamb as any of Dickens's poor, doomed children: sweet, uncomplicated, and uninteresting...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 13
