3.5 stars. ( )

A gem. Perfect. ( )

Marie reflects on her life in this one-person narrative. She is at home with her parents and brother Gabe to begin with. Gabe goes to seminary to be a priest. Her father dies quite young. Her mother, Marie, and Gabe continue living in the same apartment in Brooklyn, all working. She wonders if she will ever marry. She is shown with her friends. She works as a greeter in Fagin's Mortuary for 10 years before she marries Tom and has children. She almost dies from the birth of her first child, Tommy, Throughout all of this she has vision problems and wears coke-bottle glasses. After her brother has a break-down and spends time in a sanatorium, he comes to possible live with her, Tom and their 4 children who are almost grown. ( )

Maria, the main character in Someone really is just an ordinary woman. We first see her as a wee child and while the there is a forward progress in her life line. Alice McDermott occasionally moves ahead into the future and back into the past. It's a very effective tool because all tend to look back and reflect on the past while at the same we wonder what the future will jolt for us. A wonder novel ! ( )

As a teenager, Marie has her first boyfriend, who is not a particularly nice fellow, and when he brusquely breaks up with her, she's devastated. Her older brother takes her for a long walk:
"I felt him withdraw a little. Something in him, in his muscle or in his bone, withheld.
'Who's going to love me?' I said.
The brim of his hat cast his eyes in Shadow. Behind him the park teemed with strangers.
'Someone,' he told me. 'Someone will.' "
page 88

Marie's first job is an assistant in a funeral home. Her boss explains to her why her main job will be to be a "comforting presence."
" 'The vigil, whether it's long or short, is a burden on the brain. I don't mean the wake,' he said quickly. 'The wake is more of a relief than most people realize. I mean the vigil before someone dies. You probably know this from your own poor father' -- poorr fadah--'no one had to tell me when I got the body here that he'd had a terrible ordeal. I could see it for myself. And after a long sickness like that, every brain of every person who stood vigil is numb. I'm sure I don't have to tell you this.' And I lowered my eyes for a moment, dropped them to my lap so they would not fill with tears. I had spent the vigil for my father in the hospital's lobby, reading magazines, watching various strangers pass By, many of them carrying cones of flowers or teddy bears, some of them crying. It was my mother and Gabe who had stood by my father's bed.
'And a sudden death is no different -- worse, I think,' mr. Fagan said. 'Look at Pegeen. Because when there's a sudden death, everybody thinks about all the days before, the days that were a vigill, after all, a vigil everyone was living through but nobody knew it.' He shook his shoulders, seemed to shudder a little. 'Worse,' he said."
Page 106

At the Same funeral home, her boss Mr Fagan mentioned in passing one day, that she should look in on his mother, who lived in their apartment on the third floor of the mortuary. There, among visiting nuns and older women of the neighborhood, Marie learns about the skeletons in the closet of the"customers" and their families:
"mrs. Meany, I learned in mrs. Fagan's upstairs room, had made the trip -- by Subway, ferry, bus, and bus--to her daughter's Staten island Asylum every Sunday--every Sunday, it was repeated, rain or shine, for all the years since big Lucy had vanished from the neighborhood. Lugging, the lady said, her considerable weight and her thick legs and a shopping bag full of the cakes she had baked (not to mention the swaying baggage--as I thought of it--of that goiter) all the way out to that godforsaken place just to sit for a few hours with the girl, now a woman, who in her derangement spoke only of the most vulgar things. The poor woman, they said, poor mrs. Meany, cried herself home every Sunday, bus, bus, Ferry, Subway, unable to look at any of her fellow passengers, man or woman or child, the flesh of their hands and arms and legs, their bodies beneath their clothes, without the terrible images evoked by her daughter's dirty words rising to her mind like bile to the throat."
Page 123

Marie's mother, reminiscing about the night her husband Marie's father died in this same hospital where Marie lies in bed fighting the infection from her caesarian surgery, delivering her from her first baby:
" 'I'd been looking out the window all day. I watched the sun grow strong and I counted the Shadows as the whole day went by, and I had on my mind that it was night time when your father died in this very same place. While you and I were home and asleep, and Gabe was asleep at the rectory. Slipped away in the night when none of us was near.' " Page186

This reminded me, sadly, of my own father's death.

This is a lovely story, written by an author who created and treated her characters with love. ( )