The Nature of Things

It begins with a suicide. Jim, a young Irish Catholic immigrant in Brooklyn, recently fired from his job as a subway motorman for being chronically late or absent, decides that he'll show his former bosses and his wife that he is the one who is in charge of his life.  The way he will show them is to end that life. And so he opens the gas taps in their apartment while his wife is out and he lies down to die. Yes, that'll show them!  His pregnant wife returns home to find a burned apartment - someone struck a match - and a dead husband. And now no means of support.  Enter the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor. The nuns provide medical care for the sick of the neighborhood who cannot afford doctors. They take charge of the widow and her unborn child. They find employment for her at their convent and they provide emotional and financial support for the family in the difficult months and years ahead. The Ninth Hour is the story of that family and these nuns. The widow,...

Someone by Alice McDermott My rating: 5 of 5 stars I found this book slow-going at first - maybe because I started reading it in a doctor's waiting room with all its attendant distractions. But I soldiered on and at some point something clicked and I was there. There in the mind and life of Marie whose story this is. Marie is an ordinary woman from an Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn. We first meet her when she is seven years old, waiting on the front stoop of her apartment building for her beloved father to come home from work. While she is waiting, a young woman named Pegeen, a neighbor, stops by, having herself returned from work. The two talk and Marie learns that Pegeen has suffered a fall on the subway. Later that night, Pegeen dies, perhaps as a result of that fall. This event sets the bittersweet tone of this novel, where death is always present. Death is a part of life. Especially ordinary lives. Marie's story is told in strictly nonchronological fashion. Instead, we...