3 Books to Take On Flight (and 13 More to Devour)

In her quietly magnificent new work of fiction, her first in seven years, National Book Award winner Alice McDermott trains her masterly microscope on a single, unremarkable woman and the Brooklyn neighborhood she inhabits for nearly three decades. Someone opens with Marie, a homely 7-year-old wearing Coke-bottle glasses, sitting on the steps of her family’s brownstone awaiting her father’s return from work. From that perch, she observes the comings and goings of her fellow Irish Catholic immigrants—groups of nuns in wimples walking by, girls gossiping in the bright sunshine, boys playing stickball in the street, their games refereed by a blind umpire. As the narrative effortlessly weaves through time, Marie’s maturation is charted in richly portrayed milestones: her failed attempts at baking soda bread with her mother, her role as the “consoling angel” at Fagin’s funeral parlor. Her studious brother, Gabe, is called to be a priest, then suddenly abandons his vocation and his faith. Throughout the novel, the rhythmic undercurrents of life pulse along—babies are born, neighbors die, their departures marked by wakes at Fagin’s, women leave their parents’ homes to marry and the country goes to war again. McDermott has the soul of an archaeologist—excavating shards of the daily routine, closely examining the cracks and crevices of the human heart. A lifetime, as seen through her eyes, is marked by moments both profound (the deaths of Marie's parents and births of her four children) and seemingly inconsequential (a comforting voice in a dark hospital room, the teakettle’s whistle, the flame of a single candle). Through it all, “the ordinary, rushing world [went] on, closing up over happiness as readily as it moved to heal sorrow.”