I just started reading Alice McDermott’s latest book, Absolution. I love her work. I especially love how she grabs the reader’s attention on the first page and doesn’t let it go. This was true with Charming Billy, After This, and especially with That Night.
She does what great books often do, I think: she starts at a place of imbalance. Something is already off, or something is just about to change. Something important has often preceded what is on that first page, and trying to figure out that thing is often what draws us in. McDermott uses details to ground us, to bring us right into the action. Look at these opening lines:
“Somewhere in the Bronx, only twenty minutes or so from the cemetery, Maeve found a small bar-and-grill in a wooded alcove set well off the street that was willing to serve the funeral party of forty-seven medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine, with fruit salad to begin and vanilla ice cream to go with the coffee.” (Charming Billy)
“Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks—the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes.” (After This)
“That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into her thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands.” (That Night)
Different openings, for sure, but in every case, you would be hard-pressed to not read on. In Charming Billy, we want to know who’s died, of course, but it’s the specificity, too: the forty-seven people in attendance, the green beans, the coffee and ice cream. In After This, it’s the sensual details of the pebbles and grit, but it’s also that “mad sunlight” which we can feel as well and which makes us want to know more about this narrator and her story. And in That Night, of course, it’s those chains that go limp, in the midst of all that fury and rage and desire.
Absolution opens in a quieter way. It takes a few sentences, in fact, to get to the heart of the opening, to understand that this book is told in a different way than those cited above.
“There were so many cocktail parties in those days. And when they were held in the afternoon we called them garden parties, but they were cocktail parties nonetheless.
You have no idea what is was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.”
The past tense is the same, of course, but this book, right from the opening line, is vaguer, softer, more nostalgic. And then, in the second sentence, the use of the first person plural. A collective. The narrator seems to be a member of a group. The third sentence narrows the gaze ever further: the narrator seems to talk directly to the reader. Is this a second person point of view? But then we finally understand with that qualifying “I mean.” From here on out, we are firmly lodged in the first person point-of-view.
There are a few other asides that seem to be directed to the reader: “I hope you’re laughing” (this, after a reference to high-waisted cotton underpants) and “You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run.” There is a confessional quality to the recollections the narrator is sharing—she’s talking about what it was like to be a woman and a wife in this place, which we learn, a few paragraphs on, to be Saigon, and from the details, we begin to understand that the time is at some point in the mid-1960’s.
Then, a break, followed by a direct address: “The little girl, who posed so prettily with her parents and her baby brother was you.” So now we know: the narrator was not talking to us, the readers, with those earlier comments—or perhaps she was talking to us as well, pulling us in to the story—but the primary audience is another character in the book.
Direct address is a wonderful device. William Trevor uses it so beautifully in Fools of Fortune; Jhumpa Lahiri uses it equally well in her triptych “Hema and Kaushik” in Unaccustomed Earth. In both cases, it’s used to explore an intimate relationship between two characters. In Cara Blue Adams’ wonderful collection You Never Get It Back, she uses the direct address in four of the stories. In all of these cases, the direct address is used to explore love and the loss that love often leaves behind. There is a way in which the direct address allows the reader access into that most intimate place—the relationship between one character and another. It feels almost like eavesdropping, like being let in to an inner sanctum. (Side note: To eavesdrop: “To stand within the ‘eavesdrop’ of a house in order to listen to secrets; hence, to listen secretly to private conversation.”)
I watched McDermott in conversation with Brandon Taylor at Books Are Magic this week. They didn’t specifically talk about the use of direct address, other than the idea that the book is somewhat epistolary-like, but I did learn that the “you” in the opening will also have her own point-of-view later in the book. McDermott also said that she knew enough about the first narrator from the opening to know that she wouldn’t tell a story on her own—she would need to be prompted. So the request for this story to be told comes from the object of the direct address—she is responding directly to her. (And there’s that thing that happened before the book began.) In this way, the use of the direct address is very different from the above examples. Here, the two characters are in conversation, and they are in conversation because the narrator has been asked to tell this story. I love this and what a good question that is to ask of one’s narrator: are you able to tell us this story unbidden or do you need to be invited to do so?
I’m anxious to read on and see how the second point-of-view is employed, and if there, too, McDermott uses the direct address. I also want to read on because, once again, she has me hooked. I can’t wait to get back to those garden parties in Saigon.
See you in two weeks!
Hi Laura, just heard her last night (with Laura Zigman) & she spoke exactly to your point - that she begins in a place that responds to the “silence” she calls it that precedes … we don’t know what it is when we start reading, and it only gradually reveals itself. And, yes, it does make those openings compelling. Appreciate your other points, too, the eaves-dropping etc., overhearing a conversation BETWEEN char’s. She also made point, learned from a close priest-friend, that ‘absolution’ always involves 2 people, one cannot absolve oneself. Said thst was when she knew she had the title right!