Alice McDermott: “What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction”

Alice McDermott says if you can’t abandon literary art and still wake up happy in the morning, be a writer. Though if you don’t feel that way, be anything but a writer. McDermott discusses how fiction needs a little madness, fiction needs our flaws, and fiction needs, yes, the terrible things we do to one another: because fiction provides us with a way of understanding. In the artist’s hands, the flawed character becomes fully human. McDermott discusses her new book, “What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction."

Excerpt from What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction by Alice McDermott.

WHAT I EXPECT

New York Times crossword puzzle he had left unfinished when he responded to the alarm. Another was a big, cheerful guy with a remarkable sense of humor and a way with words—a teacher and mentor to young firemen. The third was to leave for Ireland the next day for a four-week vacation with his wife and two small children.

Daily News: three days of front-page stories filled with the sad, ironic, heroic details, as well as the familiar photographs—official fire department portraits and grinning photos of the men among their children, and then the orderly rows of firefighters outside the various churches, the flag-draped coffins on the fire trucks, the sobbing eight-year-old clutching his father’s helmet.

earned, as we say in writing workshops—by the language and the images and the circumstances of the tale. But more than this, “White Gardens” offers solace because among the many insults contained in the real-life story of that fire in Queens is the indisputable fact that time will move us all away from it, has moved us all away from it—not just the front-page editors at the Daily News, but the readers of newspapers, the eulogizing politicians, the other firefighters, even the wives and the children, the weeping eight-year-old.

endlessly, not because the moment itself takes place out of time but because the story exists out of time, unchanging, enduring, there for the reading and the rereading for what is, as far as most of us are concerned, forever.

Song of Solomon:

banlieue called Shady Hill. We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in heaven, I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.

The Counterlife, Philip Roth lets one of his characters, Henry Zuckerman, a successful oral surgeon and the younger brother of famous writer Nathan Zuckerman, read a chapter from Nathan’s latest novel, a chapter we readers have already read, the first chapter of the book we hold. The chapter is told from a fictionalized “Henry Zuckerman’s” point of view, and so we are privy to the “real” Henry’s reaction to his brother’s portrait—a portrait we readers have accepted, just a hundred pages before, as truth.

Daily News and The New York Times are full of stories and characters, as are network and cable TV, cocktail parties, family reunions. It is the careful, original, felicitous use of language that is rare and wondrous.

To the Lighthouse “the voice of the beauty of the world.”

compelling, but with the understanding that both writer and reader are compelled equally—by a story told for no other reason than that it must be told, just as it must be read.

Excerpted from “What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction” by Alice McDermott. Copyright © 2021 by Alice McDermott. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.