At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. Aunt Veronica, with her wounded face and dreams of beauty, drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, an acerbic student of elegance, sips only from the finest crystal as she sees Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossom with a late and unexpected love. And all the while, the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family.

At once a moving evocation of life’s inexplicable calamities and a magical celebration of childhood and familial love, At Weddings and Wakes is the story of three generations of an Irish-American family through the eyes of its youngest members. With eloquence and grace, master storyteller Alice McDermott transforms everyday experience into the heroic and universal.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Book Club, Historical Fiction, Literature

213 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1992

About the author

Alice McDermott (born June 27, 1953) is Johns Hopkins University's Writer-in-Residence. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, Long Island, NY [1967], Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead NY [1971], the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975, and later received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.

She has taught at the UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg and Hollins Colleges in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen.

The 1987 recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, and three-time Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nominee, lives outside Washington, with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice McDermott - image from Freebeacon.com

This is a portrait of an Irish family in the near suburbs of New York. In fact it was a little unclear to me what was in the urban suburbs and what was in the city. Several generations are represented, and tales are told of marriages, good and failed, deaths, hopes. It is nicely written, although I found that I got generationally confused at times, uncertain whether the tale being told was that of a contemporary of an older person. Still, in all, I enjoyed it. The writing is rich with detail. It is not a slam dunk recommendation, but a good book nonetheless.


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[Tim Null · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given the plurals in the title, I expected several stories about memorable weddings and wakes. Instead, the only memorable stories were about one crosstown trip and one summer vacation. Everything else is best forgotten.
Rating=1.5 rounded up.

[Danielle]

Isn't it funny how readers can have such vastly different reactions to the same book? I think I loved Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes for just the reasons many other (Amazon) readers panned it. Too wordy? Beautifully lyrical. And actually I felt that she told her story with a perfect economy of prose. Pointless and plotless? Maybe we didn't read the same book. This is not a plot-driven story by any means, it's all about an Irish-American family living in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 60s. It's not a difficult read, but the structure is slightly complex and she does ask of the reader for their attention and a certain active participation in the storytelling process. Chick lit? No, we didn't read the same book. If a story is primarily about women does that make it boring chick lit? I suspect you already know how I feel about that one. Yes, there is much about the inner lives of women in this story, which I didn't find the least boring (just the opposite as a matter of fact) and definitely no less worthy than any other subject an author chooses to write about. I guess it all comes down to personal taste, right?

I'd say it's a nod to the author's abilities that it took me well into the middle of the book to realize that the chapters could almost be read as interlinked short stories (of course I'm partial to short stories, too), though the book is classified as a novel. Best to consider it as novel that is episodic in nature. I was too caught up initially in the beauty of the prose and the story(ies) she was telling to pay as much attention to how it is crafted to be honest. It's told from the perspective of three children, keen observers despite their youth of the faults and foibles, petty grievances, unhappiness and discontents as well as moments of pure bliss and enlightenment of their tight-knit extended family.

Twice a week in every week of summer, save for their summer holiday at the end of July and beginning of August, Margaret, Bobby and Maryanne travel from their home in Long Island to that of their grandmother's in Brooklyn. It's a ritual that includes a stop at a local candy shop for butterscotch Life Savers, bus and train rides and the purchase of warm, floury bread, the sort that "Christ ate at the Last Supper", to bring to Momma's. Momma is Lucy's stepmother, and the children's grandmother. She's also the sister of Lucy's mother who died in childbirth. Four daughters Annie and Jack had before departing the world. Momma took up caring for the girls and eventually married Jack adding a son to the brood before Jack decided to die, too.

Lucy's life is not how she imagined it would be. In her mind she thinks about leaving her husband and she discusses this possibility to Momma and her sisters, but at the end of the day when her husband arrives to take her and the children home, she fixes her hair and reapplies her lipstick and returns once again to her life. Her three sisters life spinster-lives with Momma, but John has left. Both John and Veronica, the youngest daughter--the one who never knew her mother--rely too much on alcohol to see them through life's difficulties.

The story of each adult sibling, as well as Momma's life is touched upon and reflected on. Some small or big event as witnessed by the children becomes the focus in turn. Agnes, the eldest leads a refined and cultured life as a career woman with elegant tastes and a decided opinion about how life should be lived. May was once a nun, but left the religious life behind when she became too dependent on it--loved it too much. She has a second chance at happiness when a romance sparks between her and the mailman. So smitten by her he sends her flowers every week. And Veronica, the youngest, leads a life once hopeful but tinged by sadness as she carries with hera scar on her face. She's a little too reliant on the cocktails that Agnes mixes to perfection for her sisters and Momma.

It's not just weddings and wakes that bring the family together, even though a cousin jokingly tells the the children "aren't you glad that you only have to see your relatives at weddings and wakes?", though the story is peppered with them. They're just the more obvious symbols of the joys and sadnesses that fill the lives of this family. A strength of the story is how representative their stories are of the greater world around us, no matter what the period.

Maybe Alice McDermott is not for everyone, but she is definitely for me. Why did I wait so long to pick this book up? It has been sitting patiently on my bookshelf for its turn for far too long (why I need to keep reading from my own shelves). I won't wait so long to read another book by her and am now off to scan my shelves for my copy of That Night, which I've heard many good things about.

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jumpy and almost entirely in the "now" of life. Without knowing what is forward coming, and in the minutia of all the moments that are repeated. And repeated. The rituals, the core of connections for this family- especially with the sisters and Momma!

This is a novel that some will find extremely boring, I know it. I find it utterly enthralling. In detail after detail so immensely accurate to a time and place. And to an entire set of "eyes" that were shared by thousands and thousands. Life and death with a near absence of "poor me" or "poor us" involved in the picture at all. But also misguided and unable to disconnect clinging and needy attentions to the anchors- in that original birth family of 4 girls and a boy.

It's hard to understand because of the form in which it was told. Which I think was PERFECT for all its inconsistencies and non-context "she's" and "oldest daughter" or time frame mish-mash connections. Because that's exactly how life surprises and brains "remember" the past and the NOW. There is lots of missing information always- it's called "the future".

You get this book in bits and pieces, just as you did as a kid. You got to "know" by the side looks and the adult sighs and the order of operations that was "different". Heads up!

All of us have our moment "before". As the kids did in the summer cabin shrieking about the slug on the floor- just mere minutes before Mrs. Smiley knocked so late on the door.

You may like this more if you are American Irish and of an age, but maybe not. I think it is as skilled and equal to Someone in the sense of the pure everyday and ordinary of courage, family, faith and marriage. And as such a nearly perfect reflection of how real daily life "feels and acts" with our "poor Veronicas" and our trusted harbors of belief strengths always with us. And yet STILL a yearning to "more" always aside it.

For me, the 2 or 3 buses plus the el ride to Momma's was 6 star.

[Leslie Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well - this book should have been a fantastic read - there was a powerful story here with lots of potential - however the author's over descriptive language made it hard to understand at times. The story was written in the third person - she and he - however - you sometimes didn't know who you were following - who's thoughts - actions etc. At one point, they are talking about the dad arriving - and how he dropped dead at the top of the stairs - I reread that several times before I realized they were in the past - and it was the father of the now adults - not the father of the children in the story; another time I finally got the gist that I was following the dead mother - the one who had died in childbirth - but it never told me that I was listening to her thoughts until the end of the chapter when the author revealed that one of the daughters was reading her journal. The grandmother (the real mother's sister who married their father) and the children's mother (Lucy) - were both referred to as "Momma". That also added to the confusion of knowing who you were following. The author also took us out of sequence - so we were in the summer of the tragic event and the fall after that before flipping back to the fall before, going through Christmas and spring and into the summer and the wedding - before finishing up at the vacation cottage the day before the news of the tragedy arrived. Alice McDermott is praised for her ability to story tell - and I'm going to have to read something else she wrote to know whether her writing style just doesn't mesh with my reading style or whether this book was an anomaly. I really think there was a much better way to tell this story - that would have been clear, concise and she could have used all her descriptive language - and brought us a beautifully tragic story. But she followed her own route - which left me confused and rereading passages over and over again because I was lost.

[Sally Brock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book was like watching a family portrait being painted. Stroke by stroke, layer by layer, living, dead, named and un-named relatives emerge like ghosts who cannot be fully present. It allows wrenchingly intimate details of a family of Irish immigrants playing out their long held repressions, fearful, protective of their frailties and cautious of the new world around them. Within this family the youngest daughters, never named in the novel, try to make sense of the fragments of truth their family is occasionally willing and able to share. I loved it but, hell, I'm half Irish and found it a bit like reminiscing over an old family album and wondering where everyone went.

[Sharon Huether · Rating 5 out of 5]

The children, three of them tell the story of their mother, her two sisters and their mother through the innocent observations. They formed opinions, likes and dislikes.
It was their eye for the smallest detail that they remembered and cherished.
The author did such a good job of making this story so fresh.

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, I was skeptical about this novel. For whatever reason, I was convinced this was going to be nothing but fluff.

As I kept reading, however, I found myself, almost unwittingly, becoming involved in the lives of these characters. I wanted to learn more about these women. I see how McDermott gave us brief glimpses into their experiences and lives, but I wanted more.

Overall good. The novel was very powerful in its simplicity and does well at showing what a child sees: bits and pieces that are sometimes left as is, and sometimes reassembled later with other memories to create a fuller, more complete and sometimes humbling story.

[Marilyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading McDermott's "Someone," I found this on my shelf and eagerly began reading. Once again McDermott tells a story with careful character sketches and an artful way of going back and forth in time. Her writing is quite wonderful and needs a close read. She engages the reader on an intellectual level, and although you have a relationship with the characters, it is from a distance as an observer. I thought the ending of this book was artful. I will continue to read her beautifully constructed novels.

[Jonestowne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminded me of my extended family and growing up. Crazy descriptive and well-written.

[1002books · Rating 5 out of 5]

McDermott is a conjurer, recreating a bygone way of life that feels deeply familiar. Her vivid storytelling and imagery evoke the magic and tedium of childhood and capture the complexity of adult relationships. This book is more somber than "After This," but I may have liked the writing even better.

[Cate Bartholomew · Rating 3 out of 5]

McDermott's eloquent, harmonious, and graceful telling of the happenings, both large and small, of every day life reminded me of Virginia Wolfe and Alice Munro. Yet McDermott manages to remain an independent voice. Here, the story remains light but is overshadowed with a deep sense of foreboding often created by the atmospheric details and the setting descriptions such as in this passage:

She poured the Coke into three tumblers and then placed one tumbler before each of them at the white metal table. Putting it down softly so there would be no click of glass and steel, glancing toward the door as she carefully unstopped the bottle, and warning them, every time, with her fingers to her lips, to do the same.

The story is a memory told in close third person POV by a narrator who might be Lucy's eldest daughter. The tone is warm and innocent but the voice of the storyteller has a chilled matter-of-factness to it. The narrator is somewhat unreliable and the story jumps in time rather than being sequential. Despite the slim nature of the volume, this makes for a story that requires a lot closer attention to detail then one might expect. It may be a novella, but it's not a quick read. It is, however, a lovely one.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book sat in my shelf for a couple of months . . . . for no particular reason. it took a few pages to commit to it as i'd just finished a page turning mystery and this is a much different type of book. It is lyrically beautiful, a portrait of a family (in the words of another reviewer). The happenings of this family are revealed in the same way we see details in a painting, sometimes in a seemingly random order, sometimes with a hint that slowly develops into something greater, and often from a variety of perspectives that let us slowly see an image of truth. I love books that are page turners, but I also love books that let you sink into the characters. Alice McDermott has certainly produced a glowing portrait of the family's unexpected joys and sorrows. These are also the joys and sorrows that will resonate with many families as we continue through ordinary life.

Maybe it's a "slow burn" but ultimately worth working through its episodic structure to the real beauty within it.

[Tamara D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice McDermott novels are a bit like fine chocolate because as soon as you finish one, you want to go back and experience it all over again. This is my third McDermott and my least favorite, but that does not mean it isn't good (I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could). It's just not as good as Charming Billy or Someone, which were extraordinary. At Weddings and Wakes takes us into the relationships in a family who live out their lives between weddings and wakes as really, when you stop to think about it, we all do. This story of four sisters who have taken different paths in life is so honest that I felt like i knew them. The wedding of one sister was written with near perfection with the family interactions, tensions, love, and joy. Honestly, I felt like I was there.
The ending was rather abrupt and left me wanting more, but overall, McDermott shows why she is one of my favorite authors. Excellent writing. Excellent.

[Sully Augustine · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 out of 5 stars, mostly for the writing which is a bit choppy but sometimes reaches very high levels. It's less a story than an exposition of New York City life in the 1950's/1960's through the eyes of the child of an Irish immigrant family that's suffered some tragedies. Very detailed descriptions which are sometimes comic, but more often elegiac, of trips on bus and subway to visit a grandmother and several aunts in Brooklyn and by car to the shore for vacation on the far end of Long Island. It's a short novel best savored a couple of chapters at a time. I can see why it was recommended by a writer in National Review, but for the life of me I can't understand why he brought it up in an article about Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, which is a very, very, very different sort of novel.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I realized, after reading yet another book by McDermott, that nothing too much really happens in her novels. This is not a negative thing to say, however, because the little that does happen is so well explained to us, the perceptions of the characters are so nuanced, that it feels as though each scene is full and satisfying. I love her style of writing--and I don't say that lightly. I wondered, though, after reading this book, if what gives her the room to write such beautiful and fleshed out sentences is the fact that the story IS so slow moving and detailed. Her style would not lend itself well to a thriller, certainly! The family whose life she explores in At Weddings and Wakes is not a happy bunch, but each piece of joy that comes their way is fully felt by the reader.

[Anita · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall liked it, but McDermott over-indulged herself this time with the too frequent time-shifting sequencing. A person could get dizzy being wapped back and forth with a character dead on one page and laughing on the next.
That aside, a pretty good read about the usual Irish family with required characters all in place. ie, the lovable bad boy drunk who breaks hearts, the religious nun or priest, the brave young girl barely entered womanhood seeking her way in America, the nosy neighbors, the dead babbies, etc.
HOwever, worth reading for some of her beautiful phrasing if nothing else. Not as good as her "Charming Billy" but fans will probably adore it.

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

McDermott is a superb writer. This story is told by an omniscient narrator, but it's from the children's point of view, and the events aren't chronological. McDermott does a great job of telling the story in pieces, much like our fragmented memories from childhood. We find out major events in an offhand way; then the story backs up and takes us to the scene. Knowing what's going to happen doesn't spoil the book; it makes it more poignant, as if we are thininking back on our own lives. I am reading another book right now that involves the same nonlinear narrative technique, but it doesn't do it nearly as well. It makes me appreciate McDermott's skill all the more.

[KAOS · Rating 4 out of 5]

a rare book in that there is hardly any dialogue, many scenes are told out of sequence and as flashbacks, and there is not a lot of plot - just a few months of the ongoings in an irish-american family in new york in the 1940s. the writing is so beautiful i could overlook the meanderings. my mother-in-law loaned me this book; i am sure that she sees a lot of her family and childhood in alice mcdermott's books, so i am glad that she passed it on to me.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice delivers again. Among her many insights, so superbly put: "She had inherited her mother's easy access to regret." The depth McDermott achieves in this shifting narrative across multiple levels of family dynamics -- parent-child, siblings, step-relations, spouses -- over such a short narrative, is astonishing.

[Capalene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quiet descriptions. And cottages. Those are the good parts. This might be the quietest book I've ever read.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

At Weddings and Wakes is Alice McDermott's third novel, published in 1992. It's a novel that will likely appeal to admirers of McDermott's other novels, and likely won't appeal to readers who found McDermott's other novels boring or uneventful.

At Weddings and Wakes is told through the shards of childhood memories of two sisters and their brother, now presumably adults. Like most childhood memories, their memories often seem incomplete and fogged, mixing together the seemingly trivial with major life events, with little to distinguish the one from the other. At Weddings and Wakes focuses on the quotidian: the three siblings' twice weekly summer trips with their mother from their Long Island* suburban home into Brooklyn to visit their mother's stepmother and their mother's three unmarried sisters, still living together in the walk-up apartment in which they were raised; the annual two week summer beach vacation on the tip of Long Island; experiences with nuns at elementary school.

In At Weddings and Wakes, the quotidian is punctuated by two unexpected events: the courtship and wedding of May, the unmarried aunt who was formerly a nun, and her death four days later. McDermott makes no secret of these events: she offhandedly tells the reader at several points throughout the novel that May dies young. The novel ends with the "first timid tap at the glass of the front door" on an early morning at the rental beach cottage, with McDermott again casually telling us how the three children learn of their aunt's death.

As McDermott de-emphasizes surprising her readers in At Weddings and Wakes, similarly McDermott de-emphasizes extensive character development. Perhaps the most complete individual portrait is of May, who "when she'd left the convent she had understood fully that it was not because she'd lost her vocation, only settled into it too perfectly." And the most complete group portrait is of the three unmarried aunts. Here are the three children's memories of their aunts on holidays: "they would tell each other later, much later, as teenagers or adults, when had there ever been a Christmas or an Easter, a gathering of any sort, when one of them had not disappeared, retreated to a bedroom or crossed the outside hallway or torn off down the street (hadn't Aunt May once spent an entire evening on the fire escape?), just to prove what? That life would indeed go on without them, that they would have no part of the joy. Just to prove, perhaps, no matter that the children on that Christmas had proved them to be wrong, that like the dead their presence would be all the more inescapable when they were gone."

By rejecting surprises and dramatic revelations and minimizing individual characterizations, McDermott keeps our focus on the core of At Weddings and Wakes: the mélange of childhood memories. In McDermott's telling, many of these memories are especially sensuous: the screen door closing "with what sounded like three short, sorrowful expirations of breath," no doubt due to its pneumatic closer, "the notes of the organ [that] seemed to build a staircase in the bleached air above their heads and then to topple it over", that "rat-tat-tat of Momma's pressure cooker"; the sights of a "slate path that intersected a neat green lawn, each piece of slate the exact smooth color, either lavender or gray or pale yellow, of a Necco candy wafer,"of the "bars, prison bars, a wall of bars, and, even more fantastically a wall of revolving doors all made of black iron bars" that greet the children exiting the Brooklyn subway station,** of the yellow cane-rattan subway seats; the distinctive cooking odors of the old Brooklyn apartment building.

At Weddings and Wakes revolves around fragmentary memories, and not individual events or characters. As an admirer of McDermott, I found At Weddings and Wakes touching and even engrossing, although not up to her best novels. It's difficult for me to rate any McDermott novel using any benchmarks other than McDermott's novels. Compared to McDermott's other novels, of which I've read seven of eight, I rate At Weddings and Wakes as a 3.5, rounded up to a perhaps generous 4.

*While Brooklyn sits on Long Island, it's not of Long Island. For a New Yorker, Long Island is distinct from Brooklyn.
**And those same bars need to be navigated when leaving many New York subway stations today.

[Callie Whitesell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story of family life with beautiful prose, an ex-nun, and children’s POVs that made me chuckle. McDermott perfectly captures how it felt to be finding one’s place in things that have been building for generations before you.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend once described her mother as a "Christmas Mouse" because of how she savored each crumb of lemon cake during the holiday season. Anyway, this book is my lemon cake and I am a Christmas Mouse. I hope I read it a bunch more times.

[Renee Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more. It is beautifully written no doubt. But I felt the prettiness of the language prevented me from making an emotional connection to the characters. I've enjoyed others of her books but this wasn't quite the one for me.

[Abra Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel was difficult for me. I was bogged down at times. McDermott can spend 3 pages on a description of a heavy sigh. While her writing is truly beautiful, at times the descriptions went on so long that I would lose the train of thought. There’s so little action. And it veers in and out of the main story; she’ll go back in time with a remembrance, often without clear notice that you’re no longer in the present. It’s about family and the relationships and differing ways in which people handle grief and the hard turns of life. Some people wallow in their misery while others try to forget and move on. There are 2 main generations of people, and many additional characters as well. But it was difficult to know who specifically was talking or who the observer was focused on at times. Was it the elder generation or the younger children? And there were so many people that it was difficult to keep them all straight. I have loved some of the other McDermott books but this one was not my favorite.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't like this book at first. It seemed to be about ordinary life, and I didn't really feel like reading about that at the time. Plenty of ordinary life to go around. However, but I met Alice McDermott this past Spring and considered her to be a very nice person, and I had already given up on another book that she had written since that date, so I was determined to finish this book. I was glad that I did. It was certainly about ordinary life, but it takes a craftsman, and in this case, a craftswoman, to detail ordinary life so beautifully, and to remind us that ordinary life in most cases is not so ordinary.

[Bamboozlepig · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lovely prose, but the sentences the lovely prose was in were often reeeeeeeeeeealllllllllllly loooooooooooooooong. And whatever train of thought that was introduced in the beginning of the sentence had long left the station by the time the period came around. The children characters were never named, at least not in the part I read before I gave it up. Shifting back and forth between past and present made it hard to follow. I finally quit because my head was spinning, trying to keep track of the long sentences and many characters.

[Jill Hinners · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, moving and quiet book — at times a little challenging to keep the characters and unconventional timeline straight. I was so glad I read to the end, because the last two scenes were worth all the stumbling blocks on the journey. I also loved the frequent focus on the children’s perspective and the way the author incorporated details of this particular era in American history.

[JimZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book 23 years ago. I know I loved it. And as I recall it made me cry. There are not a whole lot of books that do that to me. I also liked the dustjacket.