Untangling the Time Lines

I recently saw an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the crew of the Enterprise gets caught in a time loop. At a crucial point in time - in this case, the aftermath of an explosion that destroys the Enterprise -the ship and crew are thrown a few days backward in time, only to relive in ignorance the same tragic sequence of events that lead up to their demise.

I don't know if Alice McDermott is a Star Trek: TNG fan, but At Weddings and Wakes, the exquisite new novel by the 36-year-old author of That Night, plays similar games with time in its story of a Long Island Irish-Catholic family. A character is killed off only to reappear at her wedding toward the end of the novel; a recovering alcoholic is sent back to relive his nights in the gutter; a deceased husband returns to take the last climb up the Brooklyn staircase before he dies. It's a novel that eschews conventional, linear forms for a wide-open time line to jump around on. (Talk about playing God!)

In the hands of a lesser novelist, this kind of temporal hopscotching would cause confusion, infuriation, and even boredom. But McDermott writes meticulous, detailed prose that, while threatening to sink under the weight of its own minutiae at times, often builds to luminous, wrenching epiphanies.

At Weddings and Wakes is the story of Lucy Towne Daily and her three sisters: Agnes, an uptight businesswoman; May, a former nun and Miss Lonelyhearts who gets her man - the local postal carrier - only to pass away four days after their wedding; and Veronica, an active alcoholic who rarely leaves the cramped Long Island townhouse in which the three sisters and their stepmother, Momma, who is also their deceased mother's sister, reside. They all live lives of quiet desperation, trapped in the repressions of home and tragedies of family history. Security in this family is considered dysfunctional.

While the Towne sisters are central to the novel, it is impossible to pin down a protagonist: The characters in McDermott's asphyxiating netherworld float in and out like trapped ghosts, connected only by the major events - tragic and joyful - that mark the passage of their lives. The pace is slow, the tone languid and world-weary. (McDermott breaks one of the first rules of Fiction 101: For most of the novel she tells instead of shows, and in all-inclusive detail.) At one point, with understatement so even it is almost cruel, Momma describes to her stepdaughters the sudden death of their father:

From her chair Momma said, "Your father," and the four sisters, the children too, held their breath. It was autumn then, too, she said, and it had not yet grown dark when she got home, which was why she'd been surprised when the door below her rattled and, looking over the railing, she saw their father enter the vestibule. She was on the third floor, talking with a neighbor in the hallway. She asked, "Are you all right?" and he climbed the two flights before he answered. His face was deathly white. "This head of mine again," he said and the woman beside her murmured, "Poor man."

"Go up, then," she told him. "I'll be right along." And not a minute later a cry of sorrow like she'd never heard, and by the time she reached him he was gone."

Now, I like the kind of "literature" where the sheriff gets blown away on the first page, and McDermott's deceptively simple (i.e. very difficult), subtle, police-blotter prose has more to do with psychological violence than physical action. But unlike so many postmodern minimalists, her syntax exhilarates rather than annoys, and invites - even mesmerizes - the reader; within the multiple clauses of each beautifully realized sentence are volumes on the characters, their relationships, and the way they struggle through life while trying to shake - or embrace - the bonds of the past.

One of the only characters who does escape is John, the child Momma had before her husband died. John, a recovering alcoholic, lives on Staten Island - a safe distance from the Brooklyn sepulcher - and his reformation after many years of passing out is considered a betrayal by Momma, who seems to prefer the excitement of debauchery to the independence of sobriety; at least when he was a mess she knew he was there. "She feels the same way about God," notes Lucy's husband, striking a common religious theme of the novel: Sometimes we are most alive when we are acutely suffering.

McDermott does give one of the sisters a break, if only temporarily, when Aunt May marries Fred Castle, the mail carrier. It's the emotional apex of the novel. Though the reader knows in advance that May will be dead in four days - from a blood clot in her brain similar to the one that did in her father - May's wedding is so gracefully and artfully unwoven that the effect is almost rapturous.

For a brief, shining moment, the sisters and their families are together (they only see each other at weddings and wakes, notes one of John's children) and the Four Horsemen of Irish-Catholic history - alcoholism, poverty, death, and despair - have the night off. It is a kinetic, brilliant scene, and at the end McDermott's pessimism is understandable, and May's impending doom is even acceptable. Life, the author says, is one part light, four parts loss.

Painstakingly detailed and burning with slow white heat, At Weddings and Wakes illuminates the senses and profoundly touches the heart. The Slough of Despond its characters wade through is waist-high, but the novel is ultimately transcendent.

Mark Gauvreau Judge was an editorial assistant at Common Boundary magazine and lived in Potomac, Maryland, when this review appeared.

At Weddings and Wakes. By Alice McDermott. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992. $19, cloth.