The Ninth Hour.

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour earned her a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle award last year, which went to Joan Silber’s Improvement, and as far as I can remember that’s the only reason I put in a hold request for it at my library – that and the fact that it was barely over 200 pages, meaning I could knock it out in a few days. It was certainly fast, taking me less than 48 hours to finish, but it’s a literary anachronism, a facsimile of the types of novels that used to win these awards 50 years ago – perhaps the type of book people think they’re supposed to like rather than one that they should.

The Ninth Hour begins with a suicide, significant in a book drenched with Catholic dogma and practices, as Jim decides to exercise some agency in his own life by ending it, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Anne, who in turn is taken in by a local cloister of charity-minded nuns. Anne gives birth to Sally, who spends her formative years with her mother as the latter works in the laundry of the convent, soaking up the secular aspects of the nuns’ faith and eventually toying with the idea of entering a convent herself. Anne, meanwhile, is left a young widow when barely out of her girlhood, and is, unsurprisingly, neither satisfied with her lot in life nor willing to sit back and accept it, eventually taking up with a man who is married to an invalid who is in turn tended by the nuns on their daily rounds.

McDermott’s one trick in this novel is setting up the eventual intersection of these different threads in sufficiently organic fashion to make it credible, at least up until what I’ll call Sally’s last decision, the one truly inexplicable detail (and one I feel like I’ve seen in other works as well). The affair between Anne and her paramour feels natural, as does Sally’s attraction to the vocation of the women who have all helped to raise and educate her. The discovery of the affair itself is faintly comic but, again, entirely fits within the structures of these characters’ lives, and if anything McDermott undersells any scandalous aspects to it, perhaps because her order of nuns is, on the whole, far more progressive than the Catholic Church was at any point in the 20th century.

Those nuns, however, are almost ciphers on the page; McDermott’s attempts to give them distinct characters fall flat, as their defining attributes are neither significant nor strong enough to sear their identities on the reader. By the end of the book, I sort of knew the differences between Sister Jeanne and Sister Lucy, but not enough to keep any of the sisters in my memory once I’d hit the final page. Anne is the most interesting and well-rounded character while she’s at the novel’s center, but once Sally grows up and decides she’s interested in becoming a nun, she takes over as the protagonist, and she’s quite a bit less interesting than her mother is. The longest chapter, describing Sally’s train ride from New York to Chicago to join a convent there on a trial basis, would have worked very well as a standalone short story, where Sally is the observer and pivot point but her personality, which appears just in flashes, is secondary to the cast of eccentrics around her, notably the crass woman who sits next to her (and has a vocabulary inapposite to the time period). It even ends on the right note for the conclusion of a short story about a woman on her first journey out of her birth city, considering embarking on a new and permanent direction in her life. It’s too bad the rest of the novel couldn’t live up to that chapter; so little happens and the characters are so bland that many of the chapters in The Ninth Hour are just plain boring.

I’ve read all five of those NBCC fiction finalists, and this was clearly at the bottom. I would have given the prize to Exit West rather than Improvement, with The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness third and Sing, Unburied, Sing (which won the National Book Award) fourth. The Ninth Hour is the only one of the five I’d say is below the recommendation threshold, however; it’s such an inconsequential story that illuminates nothing about us, its characters, our society, or even questions about faith, the meaning of life, or dealing with death. I’m not sure what the critics in the NBCC saw in the book to give it a nod over the vastly superior Lincoln in the Bardo for the shortlist.

Next up: Kory Stamper’s Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.