Alice McDermott: The ninth hour (2017)
247 pages
English language
Published Jan. 5, 2017
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence, and yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives--testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, through multiple generations.
I picked this up because I was working my way through the NYT’s “100 Notable Books of 2017” list, and I’m not sure why it was included. It’s basically a collection of character studies of a group of east coast nuns and their associates in the mid-20th century, with lessons about “sin” and redemption mixed in, which is fine, but not particularly interesting.
