In The Ninth Hour Alice McDermott pays tribute
to an order of nursing nuns who labored among the disadvantaged
residents of early 20th-century Brooklyn. The Little Nursing
Sisters of the Sick Poor of the Congregation of Mary Before the
Cross went into the homes of the sick and the elderly in a mostly
Irish Catholic neighborhood, performing services from dressing
wounds to changing bedsheets. Practical, caring, with strong
personalities, the nuns “do more good in this world than any lazy
parish priest,” one character remarks. The book’s title refers to
the hour of prayers in a convent as well as the time that
important events in the novel occur.
The story has multiple narrators who are descendants of Annie, a
widow of a suicide, and her daughter Sally, who worked in the
convent. At the risk of her very salvation, Sister Jeanne let an
invalid choke to death to allow Annie to be free to marry the
invalid’s husband.
McDermott, an Irish Catholic herself, often portrays Irish
Catholics in her novels. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University
and has been a National Book Award winner and finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize.
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