The Ninth Hour
Alice McDermott, 2017
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374280147
Summary
A magnificent new novel from one of America’s finest writers—a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn.
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife—"that the hours of his life belong to himself alone."
In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
We begin deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence. Yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives and over the decades testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.
The characters we meet, from Sally, the unborn baby at the beginning of the novel, who becomes the center of the story to the nuns whose personalities we come to know and love to the neighborhood families with whose lives they are entwined, are all rendered with extraordinary sympathy and McDermott’s trademark lucidity and intelligence.
Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement by one of the premiere writers at work in America today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1953
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York-Oswego;
M.A., University of New Hampshire
• Awards—National Book Award; American Book Award
• Currently—lives in Bethesda, Maryland
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975. She received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.
She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker and Seventeen. She has also published articles in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.
Works
• 1982—A Bigamist's Daughter
• 1987—That Night (finalist for National Book Award, Pen/Faulkner Award, and Pulitzer Prize)
• 1992—At Weddings and Wakes (finalist for Pulitzer Prize)
• 1998—Charming Billy (winner, National Book Award and American Book Award)
• 2002—Child of My Heart (nominated for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)
• 2006—After This (finalist for Pulitzer Prize)
• 2013—Someone
• 2017—The Ninth Hour
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/13.)
Book Reviews
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.... McDermott has extended her range and deepened it, allowing for more darkness, more generous lashings of the spiritual.… Vivid and arresting.… Marvelously evocative.
Mary Gordon - New York Times Book Review
Beautifully observed, quietly absorbing.… This enveloping novel, too, is a tonic, if not a cure.
Heller McAlpin - NPR
[T]he precision of a master.… [A] great novel.
Wall Street Journal
Stunning.… McDermott has created a haunting and vivid portrait of an Irish Catholic clan in early 20th century America.
Associated Press
Brilliant.… [P]erhaps her finest work to date.
Michael Magras - Houston Chronicle
McDermott is a poet of corporeal description.… [I]t's the way she marries the spirit to the physical world that makes her work transcendent.… The Ninth Hour is a story with the simple grace of a votive candle in a dark church.
Sarah Begley - Time
(Starred review.) [A]n immense, brilliant novel about the limits of faith, the power of sacrifice, and the cost of forgiveness.… Scenes detailing her benevolent encounters…are paradoxically grotesque and irresistible.… McDermott exhibits a keen eye for character.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [S]eamlessly written…McDermott asks how much we owe others, how much we owe ourselves, and…how much we owe God.… In lucid, flowing prose, McDermott weaves her character’ stories to powerful effect.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [E]nveloping, emotionally intricate, suspenseful.… McDermott is profoundly observant and mischievously witty.… This is one of literary master McDermott’s most exquisite works. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
(Starred review.) Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott's stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Despite his suicide in the opening pages, Annie’s husband, Jim, remains a presence throughout The Ninth Hour. He abandons his pregnant wife and defies the tenets of his faith to prove that "the hours of his life… belonged to himself alone." How does Annie choose to remember him? How is his daughter, Sally, like him? When his grandchildren finally learn the truth about his death, what is their response?
2. How did Sister Lucy, Sister Jeanne, and Sister Illuminata each come to the convent of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross? How does the work each of them chose suit their talents and personalities? How do they differ in their beliefs about God and faith, sin and human weakness?
3. What wisdom do the old impart to the young? What is gained when older and younger characters connect with each other, as Sister St. Saviour with Annie when she is newly widowed? What is lost when they fail to connect, as Patrick Tierney’s father and grandfather?
4. Who are the people and what are the events that influence Sally’s character, values, and beliefs as she grows into adulthood? How is the girl who left for Chicago to enter the convent different from the girl who returns home the next day? What happens that changes her? What does she still have to learn that the nuns can’t teach her?
5. Sally and Patrick are infants the first time we see them together. Their mothers were introduced by Sister Lucy. Patrick has jokingly told his children that when he saw their mother riding in her baby carriage, he immediately said to himself, "There’s the girl I’ll marry." Over the years, how do Annie and Liz Tierney support each other? As a young girl, how does Sally feel about Liz’s household? What kind of man is Patrick?
6. The Ninth Hour is as much a series of linked stories as it is one story told chronologically. How do the individual stories deal with themes such as truth, faith, motherhood, love, and sacrifice? What is the Ninth Hour, and how is it observed in the convent? What is its biblical meaning? Why might Alice McDermott have chosen it as her title?
7. The full name of the order to which the sisters belong and that Sally decides to join is the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, Stabat Mater. To Sister Jeanne, Stabat Mater symbolizes the triumph of love over brutality. To Sister Illuminata, it means that love applied to suffering is "like a clean cloth to a seeping wound." Why is "Stabat Mater" the title of the chapter about Sally coming home from Chicago and discovering the truth about Annie and Mr. Costello?
8. What do we know about Sally and Patrick’s married life? What strengths and faults have each of them brought to their life together? What do we know about the lives of their children? Sister Jeanne remains close to the family into her old age. What is the "pernt" of the story she tells about Jeanne Jugan? What else does she teach the Tierney children?
9. In contrast to Sister Jeanne, Sister Lucy seems skeptical, pragmatic, and often disgruntled. "All joy was thin ice to Sister Lucy," McDermott writes. But Sister Lucy is also a skilled nurse and a fierce advocate of people who are poor, sick, or mistreated. What does Sally learn from Sister Lucy, not only about nursing, but also about the human capacity for cruelty and kindness?
10. Who is Red Whelan? How does his fate reverberate down through the generations of the Tierney family? What are other examples of sacrifice?
11. Liz and Annie become close friends when their children are small, yet their lives are very different. What kind of Catholic is Liz Tierney? What is her opinion of the nuns? How are her beliefs and the practice of her faith not like Annie’s?
12. Sister Jeanne teaches the Tierney children that "God wants us to know the truth in all things," yet there are many parts of their family story they do not know the truth about. Who are the truth tellers in the book? Who lies, embellishes, or withholds the truth? How does the family’s story change as it is told and retold? How might Patrick and Sally each tell the story of the day they fell in love?
13. What do the other characters think about Annie’s relationship with Mr. Costello? Why is she not dismissed from the convent laundry when the nuns learn of what they call her "indiscretion?" What are the different kinds of "hunger" in the chapter "A Tonic"? What is the tonic?
14. Is Mrs. Costello a pathetic or a sympathetic character? How does Sister Lucy feel about her? What are Sally’s motives for choosing to spend time with her? How is Sally changed by her death?
15. What is the sequence of events leading up to Mrs. Costello’s death? Does Sister Lucy believe that the nuns were doing the right thing by keeping her alive when she wanted to die? What does Sister Jeanne mean when she tells Sally, "God is fair. He knows the truth." Why, years later, does Sister Jeanne tell Sally’s children that she has "lost heaven"?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)