ShareThisBy BOB HOOVER
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Like her fellow New Yorker Mary Gordon, Alice McDermott draws upon her family's Irish Catholic experience to shape her novels.
Unlike Gordon, she has concentrated on writing fiction _ six novels in 18 years. Rearing a family of three while teaching college classes has left precious time for writing.
One of them, "Charming Billy," won the National Book Award in 1998.
The story of how a lie damaged lives, "Charming Billy" was a surprising choice in competition against such fiction heavyweights as Tom Wolfe and Robert Stone.
McDermott's three novels published since she moved to suburban Washington, D.C., in 1997 have explored different themes and involved different characters.
Her latest, "After This," marks McDermott's foray into politics, in this case the role the Vietnam War played in an American family of the 1960s.
"I thought it was time I defined my own generation," McDermott, 52, explained, "and it was a long time coming, but I'm glad I took it on."
She explained that the corrosive effect of the war on two generations of Americans _ the "greatest generation" of World War II and their rebellious offspring of the '60s _ was an issue that needed time to develop in her work.
"This was an important period in America, but I had always been tentative about it until I decided to look at the inner life of a family in the '60s and how the war found a place in their emotional lives," she said.
The futility and daily reports of casualties in the Vietnam era made "getting through our lives tough," said McDermott, mother of three boys, "but it was only after I wrote the novel that I realized it was, in some odd way, about our lives now.
"The same kind of feeling is coming over the country because of Iraq and the realization that there seems to be no end in sight, just like it felt in the 1960s."
McDermott was unsure whether she'll continue to explore politics, but for now she is enjoying the growing praise for "After This" as it reaches readers and critics.
(Bob Hoover at bhoover(at)post-gazette.com)
