Review of ​The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott

​The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott is a novel which follows a mother and daughter after the husband kills himself by inhaling gas in their New York City apartment. A nun passing by the apartment decides to attend to the commotion where she finds the mother, Alice, pregnant and distraught from her husband’s death. The nun brings her to their church where Alice joins the Sisters in cleaning and folding laundry. Alice gives birth to Sally who grows up watch Alice do the laundry in the church’s basement with Sister Illuminata. One time in the basement as a prank, Sally employs Sister Illuminata to dress her in another sister’s habit, realizing once Alice finds them out that Sally wants to become a nun.
 
Everyone, particularly Alice, is skeptical and so in a “Baptism by fire” trial, Sally follows another nun, Sister Lucy, as she goes about caring for people outside of the church. They first go to a woman, Mrs. Castello, whose leg was bitten and then infected by a dog to care for her while her husband, a milkman, is away working. After they tend to Mrs. Castello, they find a girl crying about how her sisters were tied up by their brother. Sister Lucy and Sally go up to their room and untie them and clean the sisters up when the perpetrator and their brother, Charlie, comes back. Even though it’s heavily implied that Sister Lucy knows Charlie both physically and sexually abuses his sisters, Sally is both charmed by his looks and realizes Sister Lucy isn’t as terrifying as Sally once thought.
 
Following this initial training, Sally feels firm in her conviction to be a nun. So her mother painfully sends her off where Sally boards a train to Chicago. On the ride there, her temper is tested through a large, mean, and racy old woman, a girl who spikes her tea with whiskey and begs for money, and a little child. What Sally realizes on the train is that she doesn’t want to be a nun, so returns home on the next train. However, when she returns home, she finds out that her mother has been having an affair with Mr. Castello. And because of the affair, Sally is told to find another place to stay.
 
The Sisters bring Sally to the Tierney’s house where she and the oldest boy, Patrick, start to get along. Initially, Sally is mad at her mother, but when Mrs. Castello’s health turns for the worse, Mr. Castello abandons Alice to tend to Mrs. Castello. This makes Sally feel for her mother since she is afraid of being lonely. Sally then concocts a plan to poison Mrs. Castello so that her mother and Mr. Castello can marry freely. So one day, she goes to Mrs. Castello’s place where a few of the Sisters are already tending to Mrs. Castello, and she drops in some cleaning chemicals in Mrs. Castello’s tea. Mrs. Castello chokes after a few sips, but it’s unclear whether it’s the illness, the chunky applesauce, or the poisoned tea which make her suffocate. In the end, Mr. Castello and Alice get together and have a child, and Sally and Patrick get together as well. Though, Sally, just like her father, eventually succumbs to her depression after she has kids.
 
McDermott is a genius with this novel. It’s first so beautifully written, each sentence seems to hold its own magic. And while I wasn’t initially interested in reading about nuns, there’s so much drama McDermott shows that it’s hard to look away. There’s the father who kills himself while Alice is gone, and while everyone knows it was a suicide, they try to keep that hidden from Alice and then Sally. But then in the end, depression was what got Sally as well, speaking to the cyclical nature of family conditions and how if not addressed, they can manifest.
 
McDermott also employs time in a very interesting way. In particular, the first chapter follows an old nun as she finds the dead husband, and it is not until the last paragraph does the story fast forward, but also provide the perspective of the story. Initially it seems to be a 3rd Person POV, possibly omniscient narrator, but the last line of the chapter reads, “When our young grandfather, a motorman for the BRT whose grave we have never found, sent his wife to do the shopping while he had himself a little nap.” It provides us with who is telling the story, and what stakes they have in it as well.
 
Another, I think brilliant prowess of McDermott shines through in her transitions. There’s a chapter that focuses on Patrick as he and his father attend his father’s funeral, which in the story seems tangential to Sally. But as we’ll later learn, Sally and Patrick are the narrator’s parents. What works so well is her ability to zoom from Patrick returning from the funeral and his father getting money from Patrick’s aunt to them buying a house for all their kids, to Sally arriving at the house after she has just found her mother and Mr. Castello in their apartment. “A wide bedroom for the parents, and, after all that spreading out, an empty bedroom left over, suitable for a boarder or a guest. / Suitable for Sally when she came to the door, late in the afternoon of the day she returned from Chicago.”
 
And finally, craft-wise, while the narrative and the person speaking throughout the novel never say that Sally failed outright in being a nun, as the reader even before she steps onto the train, we know she will fail. This is because in order to be a nun, you can’t be married or have kids, and based on the narrator referring to Sally as their mother, we know this not to be the case. It’s such a subtle thing, but contextualizes her journey on the train as one of naivety and folly where her fate was already sealed before the narrative arrive there.
 
The novel also peppers in objects/situations that come into play later: the whiskey the girl on the train spikes her drink with also being used to cover the taste of Mrs. Castello’s poisoned tea, the anecdote about the alum when Sally goes into the hotel laundry becoming the building block for her poisoning, the mother and daughter she sees at the hotel talking about getting married when in the end that exact thing happens to Alice and Sally. The novel is clever, drama-filled, and crafted so well I’m left in shock. Brilliant!
 
Final Rating: 5/5