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Someone: A Novel
Someone: A Novel
Someone: A Novel
Audiobook7 hours

Someone: A Novel

Written by Alice McDermott

Narrated by Kate Reading

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

A fully realized portrait of one woman's life in all its complexity, by the National Book Award–winning author

An ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone, Alice McDermott's extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections—of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age—come together in this transformative narrative, stitched into a vibrant whole by McDermott's deft, lyrical voice.
Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an "amadan," a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott's novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another.
Marie's first heartbreak and her eventual marriage; her brother's brief stint as a Catholic priest, subsequent loss of faith, and eventual breakdown; the Second World War; her parents' deaths; the births and lives of Marie's children; the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn—McDermott sketches all of it with sympathy and insight. This is a novel that speaks of life as it is daily lived; a crowning achievement by one of the finest American writers at work today.

A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Book of the Year

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013

A New York Times Notable Book of 2013

A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of 2013

An NPR Best Book of 2013


Includes a bonus interview with Alice McDermott and her editor Jonathan Galassi

Program features original music composed specifically for the novel:
Beginnings (W. Armstrong/traditional) • You Don't Want to Go Into New York City (W. Armstrong) • It Is All Solved by Walking (W. Armstrong)

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 10, 2013
ISBN9781427213112
Someone: A Novel
Author

Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC.

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Reviews for Someone

Rating: 3.9893939566666665 out of 5 stars
4/5

330 ratings36 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    McDermott is a gifted storyteller with an understated tone. She takes the ordinary and mundane and turns it into a wonderful tale. Such a quiet and loving book. (recommended by Diane Rehm)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Alice McDermott writes like an angel. Her prose is soft and soothing. She can take an ordinary girl like Marie and show the richness behind her everyday life in Brooklyn in the early to mid-20th century. There are moments where characters are blindsided by adversity but "someone" usually comes along to make sense out of life's absurdities. There is no great adventure or shocking event to grab the reader's attention. Just the telling of growing up in a Brooklyn neighborhood in a nostalgic tone that reminds me of looking through a scrapbook of memories of a dear friend. McDermott not only provides the intimate details of the pictures she draws with words but somehow conveys the underlying emotions with her understated poetic writing.This is a book to be read slowly in order to delight in the beautiful language and encounter with a bygone era. The 232 pages went by much too quickly leaving this reader wanting more. Everyone who enjoys intelligent and tender writing should read Someone.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    3 and a half stars for the story, 4 for the performance. A bittersweet memoir of a girl's growing up in Brooklyn, and the same girl, grown old, looking back on her past. Melancholy and sometimes funny, rendered beautifully.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A touching read of one American family, written so you could truly enter a particular time and place in history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Marie Commerford comes into the story as a child as we follow her into old age. Her life is ordinary as well as extraordinary as we follow along through ups and downs of her life.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Unforgettable
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    As much as I loved the book, I'm DNFing this audio edition. The narrator's voice is far too distracting for me. She reads in an almost but not quite entirely sing-song manner and pauses in the strangest locations. Pity. I was looking forward to it because I truly did love the print book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a gentle, humane portrayal of an Irish Catholic family growing up in Brooklyn. Marie survives an early heartbreak, at the hands of a man only a naive young girl would fall for. Although she is not domestic - she has an odd stubborn streak and refuses to learn to cook - she prefers the safety of the family until her mother arranges for her to take a job at the local funeral home. One of her closest relationships is with her brother Gabe, who entered and quickly left the priesthood for reasons left murky. It is Gabe who introduces Marie to Tom, whom she eventually marries.I almost always love these character-driven, quiet stories, but this one was perhaps a little too quiet for me. My view may be colored by the fact that I listened to the audio book, and the time-shifting nature of the narrative was sometimes confusing in that format. Also, the narrator was just awful, reading the book in an excruciatingly slow, open-mic-poetry-night voice with the annoying lilting uptick that novice poetry readers often put at the end of each line. I wish I had read the print book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Someone is the historical fiction story of Marie, a young girl in Irish Brooklyn . The story is told in a non- linear fashion so we get to know Marie as a young girl as well as older woman. What I love about Alice McDermotts books is her ability to take a quiet, ordinary life and turn into something fascinating and full of both sorrow and joy. She is an economical writer who draws us deftly into the novel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Another elegant and wonderful book by Alice McDermott...this the story of an Irish girl from the Bronx, her whole life told in beautiful snippets of love, loss, hope, despair and, above all, the special courage it takes to be a sensitive human being.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    We first glimpse Marie Commeford as a child, observing her pre-Depression world from a Brooklyn stoop. The magic lies in how the events that follow reveal us all to be fools, dreamers, blinded in one way or another by hope or loss or the exigencies of life and heartbreak leads to her career as a funeral director's "consoling angel"; her delicate brother's brief time as a Catholic priest occasions her happy marriage and the birth of her children; the gestures of her young life reverberate in the griefs and the triumphs of her old age.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    McDermott's novel, Someone, is indeed about ordinary people. The insight she gives us and as expressed by another reviewer, is how "ordinary people who fill our youth, adolescence and adulthood impact our ordinary existence." I would take this a step further and say that Marie's choice to constrain her life within the geographic and cultural parameters of her childhood limits her experiences, yet these self-imposed limits offer the opportunity to mine each to its maximum benefit. In contrast to a life of adventure, travel and experimentation, Marie's life, the natural expression of a generation succeeding her parents, is predictable .. the only change being that brought on by technology or a new era. The experience of Pegeen's death early on in Marie's life is processed and interpreted differently as Marie progresses in her various life stages; it is experienced differently from the lens of life lived. The novel for me is testimony of how change is manifested in the progression of generations, yet there is that constancy: "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" —"the more things change, the more they stay the same"
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    To tell you the truth I was disappointed. The description of the story was so good that I had my hopes up. I found it too simple. Not enough. Left me wanting more detail. Might have been a better read than audio.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ahhh...such a good read for me. I'm not especially interested in the Irish Catholics of the New York region, but who could fail to be drawn in to this family's story? It starts slowly with Marie's early years and builds into a wonderful conclusion a little more than a generation later when she is a mother of children who are nearly adults. It is largely a story about Marie, but we see the world around her through her very perceptive eyes, and in particular we come to know her brother Gabe. These are all very real characters, even the ones with only 'bit' parts in the story and I think that's what made this reader feel a strong connection. We really come to see Gabe as a good man whose life is tragic in many ways. We see many people who have made serious mistakes in their lives, with big impacts on both themselves and others.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Joy's review: Warning: nothing really happens in this book; it's about the life of an everyday person. It is wonderful, but much better read just enjoying every word without waiting for a 'big event'. McDermott writes beautifully- fully formed characters, vivid places and scenes come immediately to life. We had a wonderful discussion at book club about life, death and what makes you 'someone'.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Several memories or maybe vignettes during the life of a average women, who comes alive and seems much more than average by the end of the book. Sweet and well told, I felt like I could drop by her house and find the teacups to make myself a cup of tea, and be right at home. As long as I had a story to tell.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found the book tough to get into, but in the end it was well worth the read. It was chosen for a bookclub and the group discussion almost makes me want to go back and read it again. The jumps between different times in Marie's life makes it a little hard to follow if you are reading in a single sitting (quite possible, since it is just over 200 pages long). Reportedly, it took McDermott 7 years to complete it, including a complete rewrite switching from third to first person narration. It was worth the wait. I would recommend it highly.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is my 2nd Alice McDermott novel. She is an author who won a National Book Award for Charming Billy which I enjoyed. This book about Marie covers her life through various entry points. It is not written chronologically. The style is sparse and the writing is excellent. This is simply a story about a person's life and deals with what is like to have family and be part of a community. It is not for everyone so if you are looking for a plot and action, then this is not for you, but as a character study and a good insight into someone's life, it is a good read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The plot of Someone is essentially this: Marie grows older and experiences life. I am not a fan of minimalist plots, but I do understand that good novels have many aspects. This is one that has to be appreciated for reasons other than a strong story line and that’s easy to do. Someone has exquisite writing and intricate character development. Tom and Marie are people I want to know. Their relationship is beautiful. It is based on a common culture along with loving and caring for each other. I enjoyed getting to know them as much as any other characters I’ve met through the books I’ve read this year. Marie’s relationship with her brother, Gabe, is also wonderful. Alice Mcdermott has shown the depth of love so common between a brother and a sister and yet so marvelous to witness. Gabe and Marie both have their problems, but they get through them by supporting each other. Someone is essentially the antithesis of a book like Gone Girl yet both novels are good reads.Someone is an easy book to sample. A reader can choose almost any paragraph at random and find a thorough, beautiful description with great attention to detail. Here is a description of Marie, the narrator, sitting on a stoop, waiting for her father after watching a street game of stickball.I pushed my glasses back on my nose. Small city birds the color of ashes rose and fell along the rooftops. In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill. Mr. Chehab walked by with a brown bag from the bakery in his hand. He had his white apron balled up beneath his arm, the ties trailing. There was the scent of new-baked bread as he passed. Big Lucy, a girl I feared, pushed a scooter along the opposite sidewalk. Two Sisters of Charity from the convent down the street passed by, smiling from inside their bonnets. I turned my head to watch their backs, wondering always why their long hems never caught at their heels. At the end of the block, the Sisters paused to greet a heavy woman with thick, pale legs and a dark apron under her coat. She said something to them that made them nod. Then the three turned the corner together. The game paused again, and the boys parted reluctantly as a black car drove by.I shivered and waited, little Marie. Sole survivor, now, of that street scene. Waited for the first sighting of my father, coming up from the subway in his hat and coat, most beloved among all those ghosts.Someone is a book for readers who can appreciate the fact that ordinary people lead interesting lives.Steve Lindahl – author of Motherless Soul and White Horse Regressions
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An excellent portrayal of an ordinary life, poignant with a hint of mystery and with the atmosphere, smell and vision of every scene clearly presented.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Don't hate me, McDermott lovers. I've tried her before, and after reading about this new book (and award winner), I thought I'd try again. She writes well, and I don't mind that it isn't action-packed. I do like that she examines relationships and feelings. I don't know why we don't quite hit it off. The ending was a bit abrupt for me--actually, I'll say very abrupt. I was thinking, things are just getting interesting. . . and then, "The End." But I think that's her style, and that's fine. Not every book I read can be the best one this year!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I can't remember who recommended that I give Alice McDermott a try but I have now read two of her novels in the past several weeks and I'm delighted to have added her to my list of favorite authors. This, her latest novel, is exquisite in its rendering of an ordinary life in all its extraordinariness. This is the story of Marie Commeford who grows up in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood with her parents and her brother Gabe. Her intense connection to each member of her family, and the nuances of those sweet but complicated relationships, is captured through stories, and through descriptions of moments: their taste, their smell, the sounds and the sights. McDermott effectively creates the evening in the street with shouting boys playing baseball and shy or awkward girls watching them and hoping to be noticed. There is heartbreak. These lives are not easy. But they are worthwhile; they have meaning and hope and place. Marie grows up, marries, has children. The novel follows her through each decade and it's a lovely story. McDermott explores faith without flinching, without apology for frank doubt and a bit of sardonic practicality."All the thought and all the worry, all the faith and philosophy, the paintings and the stories and the poems, all the whatnot, gone into the study of heaven or hell, and yet so little wonder applied to the sinking into sleep. Falling asleep. All the prayers I had said before bed throughout my life, all the prayers I had made my children say --- Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be --- the Confiteor if some transgression had taken place --- missed the mark entirely. It was grace, the simple prayer before meals, that we should have been murmuring into our clasped hands at the end of the day: Bless us, oh, Lord, and this thy gift, which we are about to receive."Ah yes, that is someone who knows what most to be thankful for, who knows the value of escape, in its purest form, escape from pain and loss and loneliness. Sleep is a most precious gift. McDermott's use of language is both wonderfully straightforward and beautifully lyric. After learning of the lonely death of Bill Corrigan, a character from her childhood, and witnessing at Bill's wake the heartbreak of someone who once broke her own heart, Marie sees into the heart of this man, this Walter. "Walter who had come here tonight --- perhaps the only one of his contemporaries left behind --- come down from the Bronx to weep like a child *before the world closed up over Bill Corrigan's passing*." (italics - between the asterisks - are mine) It's that last bit that I love. What a way to describe the passing of a human being out of our world, out of our time, eventually out of memory. And yet, as much as this novel is about loneliness and loss and the terror of both, it is also about love, and about the inevitability of being loved by someone.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great read, reminds of Alice Munro.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It starts out a little slowly and a little confusing. Marie is a girl growing up in a Brooklyn neighborhood, surrounded by the life of the other families lived in close proximity. We are treated to scenes from her life, first early, then late, then back again. By the end, we have lived through Marie's loves and sorrows, her experiences and reflections, and come to know her at her best and maybe her worst. Deceptively simple, the novel ends up being a complex interweaving of her life. Sweet yet deep enough to feel that it was worth the time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was a little surprised how much I liked the audio of this book. I wasn't sure from the CD's brief description but it was such an interesting look at one woman's life---shifting back and forth in time. Just a normal life, whatever that means....Marie is "someone" and we see the life she led with different events and how they affected other parts of her life.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    No one writes about the Irish American experience better than Alice McDermott. Her National Book Award winning novel, Charming Billy, is the perfect example of that.Her latest novel, Someone, tells the story of Marie, an ordinary Irish American girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Marie waits on her stoop everyday for her beloved father to come home from work, watching the activity on the block- the boys playing stickball, Billy Corrigan, blinded from the war, umpiring the game, and the men and women walking home from the subway.Someone is all about an ordinary life- Marie's life. She goes to Catholic school, has a good friend Gertie, and a brother Gabe who is studying for the priesthood. The book goes back and forth in time, so we see the entirety of Marie's life- childhood, young adulthood, marriage, motherhood, sickness, health, births, deaths, growing old.One thing that makes Marie stand out is that she has a problem with her eye. It affects not only her vision, but her outward appearance as well. When she finally gets a boyfriend, she feels elated. That balloon is burst when he dumps her for a woman who is prettier and comes from a wealthier family.The title of the book comes from an exchange she has with her brother over this heartbreak. He tells her that the world is filled with cruelty and when she asks Gabe "Who will love me?", and he says "Someone-someone will."And someone does. She meets Tom, who was abandoned by his vaudeville parents and nearly became an orphan train boy until a nun sent him to live with her widowed sister who just lost her son in a drowning. They build a life and a family together.McDermott fills her beautiful novel with quiet moments of life- a mother brushing lint off the jacket of her son in his coffin, waiting to be picked up by family members at the airport, a baby sleeping warmly on his mother's shoulder.Her language is gorgeous too. She speaks of aging as "a precarious ledge life carried you to, the ledge you lived on when you were an old woman alone, four good children or no." Of her husband, Marie said "he had the kind of face you wanted to put your palm to, like a child's."After reading Someone, it would hard to pass by a person on the street and not wonder what his life story is. Everyone has a story and Marie was lucky enough to have Alice McDermott conjure up hers. And I was lucky enough to read it. I put Someone on my list of Most Compelling Reads of 2013.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Life has the capacity, even if we don't seek thrills and constant activity, to be hectic and stressful. Personal, professional and societal/cultural concerns can all add up to a cacophony of discord that can crowd out the accomplishments, the positive interactions, the planning for something better.Which is partly why fiction is so important today. It can put the reader in another world, in another viewpoint, in another situation. Often, just that ability to step out of the ongoing noise and think about something else can be restful. Sometimes it can even be invigorating.Reading Alice McDermott is downright peaceful. Charming Billy, a National Book Award winner, is the work of a powerful observer of the small moments in life that matter. Her latest novel, Someone, is not a wild rollercoaster ride of a read. Thankfully.Marie goes back and forth in time to recount vignettes of her family from her childhood to old age. As a child in between the two world wars in an Irish-American neighborhood of Brooklyn, Marie has bad eyesight, a beloved father who drinks, a mother who appears stern but is filled with love and a brother destined for the priesthood. She has a lifelong friend, Gerty, whose mother is expecting yet another child in middle age, and talks to a neighborhood teenager who laughs at her own clumsiness.The teenager, Pegeen, was born of parents with a lovely story -- a woman from Ireland and a man from Syria managed to find themselves in an American bakery and married. She's not a beautiful girl, she has a bit of the hunchback to her and always seems to be coming undone. She's always leaving things behind and calls herself "amadan" -- a fool. In the midst of her scraps, Pegeen, says, she's not alone:"But there's always someone nice," she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. "Someone always helps me up."After a first-love heartbreak, Marie and her older brother, Gabe, now a failed priest, walk for miles in the summer heat:"Who will love me?" I said. The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers. "Someone," he told me. "Someone will."And that's all this book is about -- someone. Marie lives a quiet life that makes no waves. She is there for others in small, quiet ways just as others are there for her. Other characters take on importance because they are noted, because they are always where they belong, such as blind Bill Corrigan. A young WWI veteran, his mother irons his white shirts and escorts him down to the street every day. They walk arm in arm as a couple would. Bill sits in a chair on the street and settles streetball arguments as a referee whose authority is not questioned.Bill does not perform other actions that make him the nexus of anything, yet he is one of the vital threads that hold the community and the story together.This is the quiet brilliance of McDermott's work. The characters weave in and out of the narrative as their lives go on. What was noted as it happened earlier is recalled in passing later, and the world remains connected. McDermott also is masterful at making the small moments count, because they are such a large part of life, as when young Marie is slipped an extra sugar cube by her father and she puts it in her evening tea:I listened (to her brother reciting poetry), my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, the desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger.Whenever "the sand of Syria" is mentioned again in the novel, I go back to that dining room table and the girl Marie was, because it says so much about the woman she became.And while he is not the focus, or the sole focus, of the novel, her brother Gabe is, like Marie, a character who in other hands would have a far more dramatic arc with huge episodes and long-winded speeches. McDermott's restraint in showing how life turned out for Gabe makes his journey all the more realistic and worthy of consideration.All the characters in McDermott's fiction have such lives. And so do people we know -- the ones who won't be memorialized in New York Times obits, who won't be the subject of biographies, unless we make them ourselves. Which is what one family does for a son killed in World War II:They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond andd what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.Not remarkable at all, Florence, not remarkable at all. There should always be someone who knows.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    National Book Award winner, Alice McDermott returns to the novel after an absence of seven years with a touchingly brilliant story of one woman's life in mid-century America.We first meet Marie Commeford as a young child sitting on the stoop of her working class Brooklyn apartment in the late 1920's waiting for her father to return from work. As she waits, the neighborhood unfolds around her: boys playing ball in the street, nuns walking by and the smells of various dinners cooking wafting through the air.As the years pass her story is told episodically. Children are born, neighbors die, her first boyfriend turns out to be casually cruel, and her brother becomes a priest only to abandon both his vocation and his faith. The neighborhood changes too - becoming more seedy as the years go by.In Marie's telling of her story, everything is connected. Her first boyfriend's rejection leads her to a job as the local funeral director's "consoling angel," and her brother's rejection of the priesthood leads her to the man she will marry. There are no huge, earth-shaking events here, just the the lives of a normal hardworking family. But in the telling of the story McDermott reveals a universality in her characters. Each has their dreams and each in their own way is blinded by the demands of life and love. This is a wonderful book & I hope the author doesn't wait another seven years for her next one.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The book was transcendent; the audiobook narrator's lack of a New York accent was agonizing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a timeless novel. About timeless issues. Love and loneliness. Hauntingly beautiful. Written with the grace of a master. Very few books could make me feel such authenticity of relationships. Daughter, sister, wife, mother. Marie's life is a testament to kindness. Thank you Alice for this amazing novel.