KEY POINTS:
Award-winning Alice McDermott's fifth novel probes "the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class parents, and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges".
It follows the fortunes of the Catholic Keanes in Long Island in the 50s and 60s. The novel is a paean to the power and weaknesses of the family as a unit.
John and Mary Keane are possibly typical of their time. He has fought in Europe; she is staunchly religious. He is not her ideal husband but they grow into mutual respect and settle in to bringing up a family of four children in the relative quiet of America in the 50s. Each child is beautifully delineated.
In measured, graceful prose, McDermott dissects the family as a specimen of wider forces. Dramas are low-key and events well spaced. Despite the quiet tenor of the times, there is a sense of incipient change.
*Bloomsbury, $35
- Detours, HoS
