Mother of Sorrows

Richard McCann (Cloth, 208 pages, Pantheon Books, 2005; $20)

I share many of the sorrows recounted by the unnamed first-person narrator of Richard McCann’s collection, Mother of Sorrows. I imagine one to be particular to millions of Americans—building a bomb shelter. Charged with purpose, in fifth grade I packed my bright blue and yellow Civil Defense training manual home, directions to ensure my family’s survival. We lived within 200 miles of the Minuteman Missile silos; buried underground, they guaranteed our first-strike status and dictated our need for preparedness. Energized by the challenge, I’d begun to imagine how we could make our earthen crawl space a locus for our survival.

My dad, however, had a different idea: “Son,” he told me, “if the bomb comes we are going to sit together in the backyard and pray. That’s something we don’t want to live through.”

Given his usual propensity to overprotect, this pronouncement of his collusion in my death alarmed and confused me, made me suspicious of his motives, put me on guard for other discrepancies between word and action. Only as an adult could I agree, could I accept that sometimes the greater courage lies in acquiescence.

Similarly, the narrator of McCann’s story “Dream House” recounts how his dad checks the box for a “Go-Home Plan” in response to emergency, knowing full well how his father has resisted any plans to prepare for disaster. McCann simply presents this scene, deftly allowing the boy’s confused adolescence and the adult’s reflective resignation to be witnessed simultaneously.

Indeed, this dual perspective characterizes each of the stories presented in McCann’s collection, which hang about not only the confident voice of his narrator and the experiences of physical and emotional maturation, but also about the small disasters that, in reflection, appear to have circumscribed and made visible the life that appears as present-day only in the final story. While “mother of sorrows” suggests a character as center of the collection, her inheritance, the spectral sorrows the stories adumbrate, accretes and replaces her as the narrative impetus. This is an achievement of remarkable coherence, especially given the wide time-frame of composition for these stories, many of which have appeared previously.

All this sorrow can be uncomfortable because of its familiarity. Initially, I mistook my own discomfort inside these stories as literary déjà vu. The title of the first story, “Crepe de Chine,” brings immediately to my mind Mark Doty’s riveting poem of the same title; the traumatic experience grounding each story reminded me of Dale Peck’s Martin & John, in which each chapter attempts to imagine the worst thing that could happen; even the boyhood stories — of donning a mother’s garments, of denying the friendship of a more effete boy, of desperate assays at gaining fatherly affection—felt like I’d read them before. Add to these the losses to and ravages of AIDS, and I wondered if I held the chronicle of contemporary gay men’s lives. Upon a reread, however, I realized that McCann wasn’t telling me a story I’d heard before, he was recreating the emotions of those perilous moments when fissures appear in the carefully wrought negotiations we make between self and world, fissures that, in exposing the tenuousness of our compromises, finally reveal the marvelous beauty of their achievement.

And, certainly, Mother of Sorrows is marvelously beautiful, exquisitely crafted prose that readers can enjoy simply in its construction. For me, however, the apogee of McCann’s fine collection is “My Brother in the Basement,” the longest and most courageous narrative. The story details part of the narrator’s adult life during which he shared an apartment with his older brother, Davis, who, as one of the previous stories reveals, dies of a heroin overdose. In that story, “Fugitive Light, Old Photos,” the narrator’s mother says, “You haven’t told me why you think he died,” as she and the narrator paste old photos of Davis into a scrapbook commemorating his life. “He diedof a drug overdose,” the narrator responds. “I know,” his mother replies, andshe continues, “but that isn’t what I’m asking.”

In light of this conversation, “My Brother in the Basement” emerges as less the narrator’s lament than his mea culpa, and his acknowledgement registers the whole of Mother of Sorrows as not only entirely unique, but necessary. Without revealing its details, I’d like to suggest that “My Brother in the Basement” derives its power from bringing readers to the brink of the acceptable and making them desire the plunge over. McCann adroitly transfers sympathies from the narrator to Davis, and in so doing, places the reader in a position to recognize that he, too, has longed for the unimaginable. The recognition that we participate in that which we scorn opens the mind as only the very best literature can. Given the consequences for Davis, for the narrator, for their mother, McCann requires no less than our abandonment of preconceptions in favor of the most humane response to suffering, to sorrow.

Like my dad tried to teach me when I was ten, the lesson is not how to survive, but how to live.

Reviewed by Jon Adams

Dr. Jon Adams is a professor of English at Western Michigan University.