A deeper reality, a certain grace

Alice McDermott is such a pleasure to read. Her new novel, her seventh, extends her outstanding body of work and further cements her stature as one of our finer writers, with one of her novels winning the National Book Award and three others finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

 

Someone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, $25, 240 pages) traces the life of Marie, the novel’s narrator, from her childhood in the 1920s and ’30s in an Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn to her old age, recovering from eye surgery in a hospital room.

The novel moves desultorily among different periods of her life, not always in chronological order, each chapter a nearly complete story in itself. Yet McDermott maintains a sense of movement and suspense, withholding information about certain characters until the right narrative moment.

Marie grows up with her parents and her older brother, Gabe, who is bookish and devout. Marie, much less devout, is “a bold piece,” according to her mother. And her father refers to his children wryly as “one bishop … and one little pagan.”

McDermott paints a fulsome portrait of not only Marie and her family but of the neighborhood, peopling the novel with a variety of interesting characters. These include Blind Bill Corrigan, who was gassed in World War I, and Walter Hartnett, whose one leg is shorter than the other. And there’s Fagin, the undertaker and later Marie’s employer, who wants to redeem the name of one of Dickens’ famous characters.

Marie faces many disappointments—the deaths of her parents, rejection by a suitor, Gabe leaving the priesthood—but also joys—her jovial, loquacious husband, Tom, her four children. Through it all she remains attentive to the changing world around her and her place in it.

McDermott fills her book with copious detail and poetic observation, like this: “Small city birds the color of ashes rose and fell along the rooftops. In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill.”

Or this description of Marie’s 17-year-old daughter: “There was a way her body had, in those days, of bobbing and weaving as she spoke: as if a more assertive, adult Susan—the lawyer she would become—was elbowing past the shy child she, too, had once been.”

She captures the Irish obsession with faith, with heaven and hell, but then points beyond it to a deeper reality, such as “that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.”

Tom recalls a sermon he heard Gabe preach when he was a parish priest, about Jesus healing a blind man without being asked. He tells how he remembered this sermon about God’s grace when he was in a POW camp in Germany during World War II: “It was a good thing to remember, over there. That you didn’t necessarily have to ask. Or even believe. It gave me hope.”

This sense of a deeper reality, a certain grace, undergirds the narrative. At one point, after being rejected, Marie asks Gabe, “Who’s going to love me?” He replies, “Someone.”

At the end of the novel, Marie recalls her friend Pegeen, who died from a fall as a girl. She had told Marie that she planned to pretend to fall so that “someone nice” would catch her.

In spite of life’s many difficulties and sorrows, we continue to long, McDermott makes us feel, for someone—Someone—to catch us.

First Circles of Kansas conference

On Sept. 11, the Circles of Kansas Community of Practice 2013 was held at Trinity Heights Methodist Church in Newton. This was the first such meeting of Circles for Kansas.

Organizers hoped for around 25 people; more than 100 signed up. People came from across the state, some from Circles groups already formed, others just beginning, while others were in the exploration stage.
What is always inspiring to me are testimonies from Circle leaders--people in poverty who are working to get out. One such leader, Jo Lewis, made this insightful comment: "We're all in the same boat but have different paddles. Mine was a fork."
Heather Cunningham, the National Circles Training Center coach, spoke to the group. She noted the importance of community practices. She said that workers spend one-third of their time looking for information and are five times more likely to ask a co-worker for it.
She said there are more than 1,000 Circles groups in over 70 communities in 23 states and part of Canada. The first national conference for Circles was held this year. The second one will be held April 28-May 2, 2014, in Fort Collins, Colo.
The conference had breakout sessions in the morning and afternoon. In the first slot, I sat in on "Conflict Resolution Language" with Jeanne Erickson. She distinguished unnecessary conflict from genuine conflict and emphasized focusing on people's interests, not their positions. There was too much to summarize here, but it was excellent. She recommended the book Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations by William Ury.
In the afternoon, I sat in on "Trauma, the Brain and Your Circle" with Wanda Pumphrey, also excellent. She talked about the long-term effects of trauma on the brain and how the prefrontal cortex--the thinking, analytical part of our brain that moderates our fight or flight behavior--may shut down. She talked about ways Circles can support the healing process. Here's a good quote: "Healing starts as soon as someone listens to you and your story."
Over the lunch period, Ed O'Malley, director of the Leadership Center in Wichita, talked about the Circles vision. He mentioned three things Circles groups need to do:
• increase their comfort with ambiguity,
• hold to the purpose,
• create the container for the work.
Heather Cunningham closed the conference with a short presentation about leadership. She said that if we make leadership something bigger than ourselves, we fail to recognize it.
I came away further encouraged to continue being involved in this important work of being with people who are working hard to get out of poverty, in the face of huge systemic barriers. I bristle each time I hear some politician (or anyone) talk about how lazy poor people are. I've never met such courageous and resourceful people. I want to say, Just try to walk in their shoes.

A lesson on the Civil Rights Movement

Whenever a film says it is “inspired by a true story,” you can bet there isn’t much in it that’s true.

Such is the case for The Butler, directed by Lee Daniels, a highly fictionalized account of Eugene Allen, who served as a butler in the White House during the administrations of eight presidents, from Truman to Reagan.

In the movie, Allen is named Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) and begins working in the White House during the Eisenhower administration. Daniels uses this framework to juxtapose this man’s faithful service with the racial turmoil going on in the country over these years.

The film wants to show us and help us feel the pain of African Americans during the years of this man’s life (he died in 2010). So we witness Cecil’s father being shot to death in the cotton fields by the white owner, who has just raped Cecil’s mother. While this didn’t happen to Eugene Allen’s parents, it likely happened to many others.

And the movie has Cecil’s older son, Louis (David Oyelowo), conveniently take part in just about every important event of the civil rights era, from the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides and even being present in the motel room with Dr. King just before he is shot. Then, of course, he joins the Black Panthers.

While such coincidence is beyond belief, it nevertheless introduces audiences who don’t know to these important events and the impact they had on the country. We also witness the various presidents as they try to decide how to respond to this movement. Meanwhile, Cecil continues his service without voicing any political opinions on the job.

Home is a different story. There he quarrels with his son, opposing his actions and worried for his safety. And his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), left alone while Cecil works long hours, turns to drink for solace.

Daniels has made a dramatic yet didactic film that serves well those who haven’t taken the time to watch such documentaries as Eyes on the Prize or Freedom Riders. He has assembled an impressive cast of actors, including the wonderful Whitaker in the title role, plus Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. The actors who play presidents are well-known (Robin Williams as Eisenhower, John Cusack as Nixon, for example) and, because of that, distracting. I had to laugh when seeing Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan.

The Butler also serves to give us a glimpse of African-American domestic life in a middle-class home during these years. We also get a glimpse of Cecil’s Christian faith. The real butler, Eugene, was a long-time, active member of his church.

Daniels’ film has been number one at the box office for the past few weeks. It’s good that audiences are being exposed to stories of African Americans and their struggle to find freedom and dignity in a country that too often denies them that, especially since many of these viewers will not take time to watch documentaries that tell a fuller, truer story.