In ‘The Ninth Hour,’ a death reverberates for generations
Midway through “The Ninth Hour,” Alice McDermott’s brilliant new novel set in the early 20th century, teenage Sally accompanies Sister Lucy on the nun’s visits to run-down Brooklyn, N.Y., tenement houses. Sally’s mother, Annie, has worked in the laundry of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor since her daughter’s birth, and Sally has spent much of her life at the convent. In part because of the influence of Sister Lucy, Sally is contemplating a life dedicated to serving the poor and needy.
She receives a harsh lesson in what that entails, however, when on their rounds they visit Mrs. Costello, the wife of the milkman who has delivered cream to the convent for many years. Mrs. Costello has been an invalid since her mid-30s, when an infection from a dog bite led to the amputation of one of her legs.
Sally witnesses not only the degradation that Mrs. Costello endures but also Sister Lucy’s limited ability to ease the woman’s pain. As Sister Lucy tells Sally on their return to the convent, “Never think for a minute that you will erase all suffering from the world with your charms.”
That’s a bracing comment to share with a teenager grappling with her relationship toward faith. Another such comment comes from Sister Illuminata, the nun whom Annie works for in the laundry, when she tells Sally that “there is a hunger” in all of us. She refers to the desire for comfort and the myriad places one can find it, from the touch of another person to the embrace of God. And it is this dichotomy, the conflict between the corporeal and the spiritual, the desire for companionship and belonging versus a higher calling, that McDermott explores in what is perhaps her finest work to date.
She memorably introduces that struggle in the book’s opening pages. Annie is a young wife, pregnant with Sally and married to 32-year-old Jim, a handsome man with “dark-lashed eyes that had been making women catch their breath since he was sixteen.” He has lost his job as a trainman on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit. On a February day, while Annie is out buying groceries, he fits his overcoat over the apartment’s threshold, yanks out the rubber hose that connects the oven to the gas tap — “There was a satisfying pop, and a hiss that quickly faded” — and puts the hose into his mouth, like “a fat sultan on a red pillow doing much the same” from a childhood storybook.
From Jim’s shocking suicide, McDermott fashions a riveting story that moves back and forth in time, spans multiple generations and shows the limits of faith and the challenge in maintaining it. In one beautifully wrought scene after another, McDermott shows the kindness of the Sisters who offer Annie employment; the Tierney family, who provide a home for Annie and her daughter; the friendship that develops between Annie and Mr. Costello; and, in the most indelible of the book’s storylines, Sally’s personal novitiate that takes her on an illfated train trip to Chicago, where she is to work with the Sisters there in the hope of pursuing her calling. The lessons Sally learns about herself on this journey are among the book’s many startling revelations.
Adding to the multilayered pleasures of “The Ninth Hour” is a framing device McDermott alludes to early on: Characters in the present day are relating the story. Only gradually do we learn who these narrators are and their relationships to the book’s main characters.
“The Ninth Hour” has its flaws. Sally’s train ride to Chicago consists of a series of unpleasant experiences. A more nuanced dramatization of Sally discovering her impulses when confronted with the rudeness of others would have made her eventual transformation more realistic.
And, late in the novel, Sally overhears Patrick, one of the six Tierney children, explaining to his brother Tom the inevitability of certain scientific phenomena and the truths that they reveal. The timing of the discussion at the moment Sally enters the room is too convenient, a case of McDermott triply underlining her point. Yet it neatly encapsulates one of the themes that emerge from this otherwise magnificent book: You may think you’ve figured yourself out, but circumstances outside your control have a funny way of showing you who you really are. Michael Magras is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald.