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1992-09-10
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REVIEWS, Page 96BOOKSDancing on Graves
By JILL SMOLOWE
TITLE: At Weddings and Wakes
AUTHOR: Alice McDermott
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 213 Pages; $19
THE BOTTOM LINE: McDermott secures her reputation as a
mesmerizing storyteller
It gives nothing away to reveal that near the end of Alice
McDermott's lyrical novel At Weddings and Wakes, there is a
joyous wedding celebration. The bride, an aging ex-nun, allows
herself to be swirled by her staid groom, a mailman who
unexpectedly proves a sure-footed dancer. Even Momma, the
embittered matriarch of the Irish-American Towne clan, permits
herself a few sentimental tears. But when the party ends, Momma
reminds the Roman Catholic celebrators that they have been
"dancing on graves." Four days later, there will be a fresh
grave to dig -- that of May, the autumn bride -- and the family
will sink back into the regret and loss that threaten to smother
three generations of Townes.
With her third novel, McDermott secures her reputation as
a mesmerizing and innovative storyteller. In the haunted world
that she conjures, dead relatives command greater attention than
the living. It is a measure of the author's formidable skills
that she vividly evokes the misery of Momma Towne and her four
stepdaughters without suffocating the reader in their chronic
gloom. While the backdrop is one of complaint, cryptic exchanges
-- "That again? Are we rehashing that again?" -- are enough to
remind us of the women's litany. Their oppressive unhappiness
is artfully offset by the vitality of the three youngest Townes,
who, like flowers that bloom in urban sidewalk cracks, fight for
life.
As in her memorable second novel, That Night, McDermott
boldly scrambles time, surrounding the story's central incident
-- May's death -- with past and future events. By serving early
warning of May's death, the author invests all that follows with
poignancy.
The most perplexing stepdaughter is Lucy, who marries a
patient, loving man. Although the couple move to Long Island and
have three children, Lucy's thoughts never stray far from
Momma. Each week she returns to her stepmother's Brooklyn
apartment, where she complains that her husband "is not the man
I married." No hint of the husband's failing is offered, but one
suspects he sins only in offering Lucy no tragedy around which
to shape her life.
For Lucy's children, however, McDermott offers a
life-affirming lesson that promises to puncture the family's
despair. As May's wedding day ends and her death approaches, a
relative begins a drunken lament of the family's woes. Suddenly
a young cousin huffs, "Who cares? Who really cares?" With that
brushstroke, McDermott points the way toward a brighter future.