Linda's Reviews > The Ninth Hour

"Fairness demanded that grief should find succor, that wounds should heal, insult and confusion find recompense and certainty, that every living person God had made should not, willy-nilly, be forever unmade."

And when the suffocating weight of despair visits upon the souls of the hopeless, choices will fit into the maze of forever. Jim sends his young wife, Annie, out the door of their delapitated Brooklyn tenement in order to do the weekly shopping. The turn of that knob clicks off something within him. Like the closing of this door, Jim chooses to shutter any ray of light remaining in his self-perceived worthless life. He turns the switch slowly on the gas stove and snuffs out the future in a single gesture. The lives of Annie and his unborn child will be chiseled with anguish and desperation.

But when sorrow visits the doorsteps of these tenements, it ushers in the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor. The bend and the turn of the 20th Century reveals the fate of the recent immigrants and the destitute who live on the streets of Brooklyn. We will come to know Alice McDermott's chosen characters who reveal a stamina and a resilience reflecting life choices that will leave a darkening stain upon themselves and those who follow in the future. "She saw how the skim of filth, which was despair, which was hopelessness, fell like soot on the lives of the poor."

Annie is offered an opportunity to work in the convent's basement laundry. The labor is hard, but Annie has her little daughter, Sally, in a basket by her side and is able to stay in her apartment. We will focus on these two characters who were handed the roughest end of the stick. It will be Sally's future that will turn the wheels on this brilliant novel.

Alice McDermott crafts this novel with words hitting bone upon bone. Lives are complicated. Period. Nothing fits perfectly into boxes labeled good and bad. And does fate seal the deal? McDermott hones her characters with the uneven curves of simple humanity. She has been given a fine talent for allowing the readers to feel, to the core, every profound action within these pages. This will be a novel that you won't be forgetting any time soon. A Brooklyn Guarantee.