In Alice McDermott’s Novel, A Cloistered Life Blows Open

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/books/review/the-ninth-hour-alice-mcdermott.html

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THE NINTH HOUR By Alice McDermott 247 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

Writing about nuns is a risky business. So many icons inhabit the larger imagination, and, in the way of icons, they tend to be two-dimensional: the saintly Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and “The Nun’s Story”; the lovably crusty Maggie Smith and the lovably giggly Kathy Najimy of “Sister Act.” And then there’s the other side: the aggressively unlovable Sister Mary Ignatius of Christopher Durang’s play, wielding a ruler and a threat of hell. Novelty marketers have even gotten in on the act with a miniature mechanical Nunzilla who spits sparks as she waddles menacingly toward the unsuspecting sinner.

In “The Ninth Hour,” Alice McDermott has taken the risk of writing about nuns, and the risk has been more than worth it. Known and admired for her portrayal of Irish-American family life, she has now extended her range and deepened it, allowing for more darkness, more generous lashings of the spiritual. Men are virtually absent from the narrative, as they are in convent life, making marginal appearances when they’re temporarily required, not really missed in most instances.

The setting is Irish Brooklyn, beginning early in the 20th century, although we make brief stops up the Hudson and catch glimpses of the American Civil War. The action begins with an almost careless, cavalier suicide by a young subway worker whose wife, Annie, is pregnant with their first child. The aftermath is handled by one of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, elderly Sister St. Saviour. An expert at gaming the system, which is in the hands of Irish Catholic men, she almost succeeds in outwitting the priests by arranging for a Catholic burial, denied to suicides. But as a nun, a woman, she must acknowledge that her power is limited and at the last minute a proper burial is denied. Sister St. Saviour doesn’t abandon the pregnant widow, and after the old nun’s death Annie’s infant daughter is baptized St. Saviour, although she’s afterward known as Sally. Sister St. Saviour also gets Annie a job in the convent laundry, where she and her daughter will be safe and cared for. The novel follows Sally through her childhood, young adulthood, midlife, old age and death, introducing a complex cast of characters and the ever-present phantom of Irish Catholic life: the looming shadow of shame.

Most of the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, like the exigent Sister Lucy and the loving, almost elfin Sister Jeanne, spend their days outside the convent in the service, as their name suggests, of the indigent and ailing. We see very little of their formal religious life. Although the ninth hour of the novel’s title is the time for prayer that occurs at 3 in the afternoon, it also refers to the hour that Jesus died (as well as the less spiritual encounters Annie regularly indulges at the very same time).

It’s the convent laundry that provides the setting for some of McDermott’s most vivid and arresting descriptions. Like Homer in the “Iliad,” with his catalog of ships, she presents us with a list of the riches of the convent laundress’s magic potions: “Bran water to stiffen curtains and wimples, alum water to make muslin curtains and nightware resist fire, brewed coffee to darken the Sisters’ stockings and black tunics, Fels-Naptha water for general washing, Javelle water (washing soda, chloride of lime, boiling water) for restoring limp fabric…. She had an encyclopedic understanding of how to treat stains. Tea: Borax and cold water. Ink: milk, salt and lemon juice. Iodine: chloroform. Iron rust: hydrochloric acid. Mucus: ammonia and soap. Mucus tinged with blood (which she always greeted with a sign of the cross): salt and cold water.”

Alongside these litanies, McDermott inserts unforgettable details. Sister Illuminata, the laundress, has a “right index finger marked with the shining oval of a testing-the–iron scar.” The nun carves toys out of ivory soap to entertain little Sally, but these are a worry for her mother: When the child rubs her eyes with fingers coated with soap, wild tears ensue.

The teenage Sally’s sheltered, almost cloistered life is blown apart on the train trip she takes from New York to Chicago on her way to enter the convent she has decided to join. In enumerating the orders of nuns she has to choose from, McDermott provides another marvelously evocative litany of names: “The Little Sisters of the Assumption.… The Sisters of Divine Compassion, of Divine Providence. … the Daughters of Wisdom. The Daughters of Charity. The Sisters of Charity.… The Visitation Nuns. The Presentation Nuns. The Handmaids of the Holy Child.”

The train Sally boards seems to be a branch of the Hieronymus Bosch Railroad Company, providing McDermott ample opportunity to display her gift for atmospheric evocation. Taking her place beside Sally is a woman whose “clothes gave off the smell of artificial violets and, just behind it, cooking oil.… She was breathing heavily … the quick, agitated breathing of an animal in distress. Sally glanced at the brown bags, their handles tied together with dirty string, glimpsed the unconscious motion of the panting woman’s bosom, and felt the most peculiar brush of panic — like the wing-stroke of a bat against her hair.”

Learning that Sally is on her way to join a convent, this monster insists on acquainting the young woman with all the hideous aspects of sex. Attempting to escape her, Sally encounters another nightmare creature, who bilks her of much of her small stash of money with a sob story that’s clearly bogus. Other passengers spread their noxious fumes into all the available air. Before Sally even gets to Chicago, shocked at the darkness of the human condition, she decides to abandon her vocation and returns home, only to receive another, more profound shock.

The Little Sisters of the Sick Poor can keep sex from crossing their threshold, but they can’t banish it from the larger world. This is both the bad and the good news of “The Ninth Hour,” and it’s the catalyst for the crucial choices Sally and Sister Jeanne will make. Opting for love over law, they sacrifice their own peace of mind and the promise of eternal salvation. In dramatizing these choices, McDermott unfolds the origami of a particular Catholic mind-set, in which the stakes are the highest and no neat or clear outcome is available.

Although I admire the sweep of “The Ninth Hour,” I’m uneasy with McDermott’s storytelling strategy. One of Sally’s children narrates intermittently, but for the literal-minded among us it seems unlikely that a third party could provide the intimate details that so enrich the novel, or be so familiar with the other characters’ inner lives. If this is meant to be a metafictional move, it’s not meta enough, since most of the novel operates in a formally realistic fashion.

And what McDermott achieves most splendidly is the hyper-realistic portrayal of the grim, often disgusting aspects of illness and death among the poor: the boils and pustules, the grotesquely swollen or missing limbs, the ubiquitous stink of human waste. This achievement situates the life of a nun where it ideally belongs, in the difficult, often conflicting world that embraces practical competence, a commitment to giving more than could reasonably be asked and a lived belief not only in the goodness but, in Sister Jeanne’s words, the “fairness” of God, which demands “that grief should find succor, that wounds should heal, insult and confusion find recompense and certainty … that every living person God had made should not, willy-nilly, be forever unmade.”