November 1, 2013--"Someone"

The novel I am reading on a parallel track with Evan Thomas' biography of President Eisenhower, Ike's Bluff, is Alice McDermott's lapidary Someone. It is the story of a unremarkable woman's remarkable life.

It is as good as her memorable 1998 Charming Billy.

If you haven't yet read Someone, I cannot recommend it too highly.

To tempt you, here is a taste. A scene from early in the book when the narrator at seven is beginning to understand her world. It is about the light that illuminates her family's Brooklyn apartment, a light that she is coming to understand metaphorically--

The apartment we lived in was long and narrow, with windows in the front and in the back. The back caught the morning light and the front the slow, orange hours of the afternoon and evening. Even at this cool hour in late spring, it was a dusty city light. It fell on paint-polished window seats and pink carpet roses. It stamped the looming plaster walls with shadowed crossbars, long rectangles; it fit itself through the bedroom door, crossed the living room, climbed the sturdy legs of the formidable dining-room chairs, and was laid out now on the dining-room table where the cloth--starched linen expertly decorated with my mother's meticulous cross-stitch--had been carefully folded back along the whole length so that [my brother] Gabe could place his school blotter and his books on the smooth wood. 

It was the first light my poor eyes ever knew. Recalling it, I sometimes wonder if all the faith and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don't shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.

No one has ever written about light in this way.