Evening Book Club: Book Club
Contact Information
For more information regarding the Evening Book Club, please contact: Jaclyn Gomez at bkdiscuss@hkdpl.org
Meeting Schedule
Next Meeting:
June 25, 2018, 7pm
June's Book:
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions
1. Despite his suicide in the opening pages, Annie's husband, Jim, remains a presence throughout THE NINTH HOUR. He abandons his pregnant wife and defies the tenets of his faith to prove that "the hours of his life...belonged to himself alone." How does Annie choose to remember him? How is his daughter, Sally, like him? When his grandchildren finally learn the truth about his death, what is their response?
2. How did Sister Lucy, Sister Jeanne and Sister Illuminata each come to the convent of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross? How does the work each of them chose suit their talents and personalities? How do they differ in their beliefs about God and faith, sin and human weakness?
3. What wisdom do the old impart to the young? What is gained when older and younger characters connect with each other, as Sister St. Saviour with Annie when she is newly widowed? What is lost when they fail to connect, as Patrick Tierney's father and grandfather?
4. Who are the people and what are the events that influence Sally's character, values, and beliefs as she grows into adulthood? How is the girl who left for Chicago to enter the convent different from the girl who returns home the next day? What happens that changes her? What does she still have to learn that the nuns can't teach her?
5. Sally and Patrick are infants the first time we see them together. Their mothers were introduced by Sister Lucy. Patrick has jokingly told his children that when he saw their mother riding in her baby carriage, he immediately said to himself, "There's the girl I'll marry." Over the years, how do Annie and Liz Tierney support each other? As a young girl, how does Sally feel about Liz's household? What kind of man is Patrick?
6. THE NINTH HOUR is as much a series of linked stories as it is one story told chronologically. How do the individual stories deal with themes such as truth, faith, motherhood, love and sacrifice? What is THE NINTH HOUR, and how is it observed in the convent? What is its biblical meaning? Why might Alice McDermott have chosen it as her title?
7. The full name of the order to which the sisters belong and that Sally decides to join is the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, Stabat Mater. To Sister Jeanne, Stabat Mater symbolizes the triumph of love over brutality. To Sister Illuminata, it means that love applied to suffering is "like a clean cloth to a seeping wound." Why is "Stabat Mater" the title of the chapter about Sally coming home from Chicago and discovering the truth about Annie and Mr. Costello?
8. What do we know about Sally and Patrick's married ife? What strengths and faults have each of them brought to their life together? What do we know about the lives of their children? Sister Jeanne remains close to the family into her old age. What is the "pernt" of the story she tells about Jeanne Jugan? What else does she teach the Tierney children?
9. In contrast to Sister Jeanne, Sister Lucy seems skeptical, pragmatic, and often disgruntled. "All joy was thin ice to Sister Lucy," McDermott writes. But Sister Lucy is also a skilled nurse and a fierce advocate of people who are poor, sick or mistreated. What does Sally learn from Sister Lucy, not only about nursing, but also about the human capacity for cruelty and kindness?
10. Who is Red Whelan? How does his fate reverberate down through the generations of the Tierney family? What are other examples of sacrifice?
11. Liz and Annie become close friends when their children are small, yet their lives are very different. What kind of Catholic is Liz Tierney? What is her opinion of the nuns? How are her beliefs and the practice of her faith not like Annie's?
12. Sister Jeanne teaches the Tierney children that "God wants us to know the truth in all things," yet there are many parts of their family story they do not know the truth about. Who are the truth tellers in the book? Who lies, embellishes or withholds the truth? How does the family's story change as it is told and retold? How might Patrick and Sally each tell the story of the day they fell in love?
13. What do the other characters think about Annie's relationship with Mr. Costello? Why is she not dismissed from the convent laundry when the nuns learn of what they call her "indiscretion?" What are the different kinds of "hunger" in the chapter "A Tonic"? What is the tonic?
14. Is Mrs. Costello a pathetic or a sympathetic character? How does Sister Lucy feel about her? What are Sally's motives for choosing to spend time with her? How is Sally changed by her death?
15. What is the sequence of events leading up to Mrs. Costello's death? Does Sister Lucy believe that the nuns were doing the right thing by keeping her alive when she wanted to die? What does Sister Jeanne mean when she tells Sally, "God is fair. He knows the truth." Why, years later, does Sister Jeanne tell Sally's children that she has "lost heaven"?
Book Summary
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife—“that the hours of his life belong to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
We begin deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence. Yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives and over the decades—testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.
The characters we meet, from Sally, the unborn baby at the beginning of the novel, who becomes the center of the story, to the nuns whose personalities we come to know and love, to the neighborhood families with whose lives they are entwined, are all rendered with extraordinary sympathy and McDermott’s trademark lucidity and intelligence.
An Interview with the Author
An Interview With The Author
Book Reviews
Reviews of our current book.
Click on the links to read the full review!
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The New York TimesWriting about nuns is a risky business. So many icons inhabit the larger imagination, and, in the way of icons, they tend to be two-dimensional: the saintly Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and “The Nun’s Story”; the lovably crusty Maggie Smith and the lovably giggly Kathy Najimy of “Sister Act.” And then there’s the other side: the aggressively unlovable Sister Mary Ignatius of Christopher Durang’s play, wielding a ruler and a threat of hell. Novelty marketers have even gotten in on the act with a miniature mechanical Nunzilla who spits sparks as she waddles menacingly toward the unsuspecting sinner.
In “The Ninth Hour,” Alice McDermott has taken the risk of writing about nuns, and the risk has been more than worth it... -
NPRIn one beautifully observed, quietly absorbing novel after another, Alice McDermott has made the insular world of New York's Irish Catholic immigrants in the first half of the 20th century her own, much as Anne Tyler has laid claim to Baltimore's middle class. And, like Tyler, in focusing tightly on a close-knit community of ordinary people, she leads us to a deeper understanding of the human condition...
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The Washington Post“The Ninth Hour,” Alice McDermott’s superb and masterful new novel, begins with a suicide and culminates in murder. The book’s real thrills, though, are in the feats of its storytelling. McDermott lays out all the pieces at the beginning: In the early years of the 20th century, a 32-year-old man asphyxiates himself in a railroad flat, and two nuns come to the aid of his pregnant widow.
(Farrar Straus Giroux)
Her baby, Sally, will in time marry a man named Patrick, and Sally and Patrick’s children narrate this novel to extraordinary effect. They put their family’s stories together, returning again and again to the same place, often with rhythmical cadence, knowing it better and feeling it more deeply each time, as in a prayer or psalm:
“When our father was very old — we were growing old ourselves — he told again the story he had told her that wet night, the story of his grandfather’s funeral.”...
The Author's Website
The author's website.
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Alice McDermottInformation about her books and herself, as well as news, media, contact information, etc.
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