Mary McGarry Morris’s Songs In Ordinary Time is a testament to humanity at its lowest, covering every small detail of lives corrupted by, well, life. It centers on Atkinson, Vermont in the summer of 1960, and dives deep into the lives of a kaleidoscope of people. Each character is different and utterly fleshed out, so the book feels like glimpses into real people’s minds. I – being someone who enjoys delving into the miseries of real life, shuddering at the mere thought of something sugar-coated – found myself enthralled with this tale.
tThe characters are what create the infatuation. Marie Fermoyle, the single mother struggling to make ends meet, her ex-husband Sam Fermoyle, the town drunk, and their three children. Norm, ruled only by his temper, Benjy, silent and fearful, and Alice, lonely and desperate. This is the family displayed on center stage, along with Omar Duvall, a conman that wiggles, lying the whole time, into their lives and Marie’s heart.
t Among Atkinson’s more eccentric citizens, there is Father Gannon, a wayward priest who is anxious for affection, grappling to find it anywhere. There is also Joey seldom, a blind man working a popcorn stand teetering on the verge of being torn down. Lastly, and most eccentric of all is Renie LaChance, the uncle of Norm, Benjy, and Alice. He’s an appliance storeowner that makes anonymous pornographic phone calls to random women in his spare time.
tWhile I can’t say that I’ve down that, it was easy to find myself relating to the characters. They were motivated by the same emotions we all are. Greed, guilt, lust, love, affection. Each character, in his or her own way, is struggling for a place of belonging, same as all of us folks in the real world.
tMost readers will find themselves drawn into this dark, realistic world, rooting for those failing characters. I know I was hoping that the perfect Klubock family that lived next door to the Fermoyles would do something to tarnish their name and fall down from their nirvana of fantasy just so they would be on the same footing as the rest. Which is how most readers will find themselves thinking. Or so I believe.
tAbove all, you root for the lonely ones. Which is almost every single denizen in Morris’s novel. The very last line of the narrative sums so much of everything that happened in the pages right up. “Alone, she kept thinking, alone, alone, alone, alone; then suddenly she burst into teary laughter and could not stop.”



Friends Who Didn’t Mince Words
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: December 9, 2010

The story of Julia Child’s life — how a gawky and outgoing diplomat’s wife from Pasadena, Calif., came to write the classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (1961) — has been told so many times and in so many ways (biographies, memoirs, histories of American eating, movies, PBS documentaries, blogs) that it’s not clear there’s more worth knowing. This potato has been peeled.

Now comes “As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto,” a book for completists, the sort of pathetic losers who’d line up to buy a book of Child’s grocery lists, were it available. Well — full miserable disclosure — I am exactly that type of pathetic loser. So I picked up “As Always, Julia” with a modest tingle of anticipation. A good book of letters beats an almost-good novel any day.
That modest tingle turned into deepening sense of appreciation. The pleasures of “As Always, Julia” are modest but real. This book feels like chick lit — or should I call these women very game hens? — of an exalted order. The sound it makes is that of two housewives, each in her 40s, becoming pen pals and then ecstatic soul mates in the dreary 1950s. They let rip about all kinds of things, from shallots, beurre blanc and the misery of dried herbs to politics, aging and sex.
Sex? “Before marriage I was wildly interested in sex,” Child wrote DeVoto in 1953, “but since joining up with my old goat, it has taken its proper position in my life.” After reading the libidinous best seller “Peyton Place,” Child wrote to her friend: “Those women, stroked in the right places until they quiver like old Stradivarii! Quite enjoyed it, though feeling an underlying abyss of trash.”
The correspondence between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto began in 1952, and almost by chance. Child had admired a column that DeVoto’s husband, the journalist Bernard DeVoto, had written for Harper’s magazine about knives. When Child, who was living in Paris at the time, composed a fan letter to Bernard DeVoto, Avis, who handled much of her husband’s correspondence, wrote back. The two clicked instantly.
The DeVotos were intellectuals and bons vivants in Cambridge, Mass. Bernard DeVoto had won both a Pulitzer Prize (in 1948) and a National Book Award (in 1953) for his histories of the American West and was a boisterous defender of civil liberties. (He seems to be making a comeback. The editors of The Atlantic just named his book “The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto,” published in 1948 and reissued this year, one of the best books they read in 2010.)
Avis DeVoto worked as her husband’s secretary but had a firm life and mind of her own. She regularly reviewed mystery novels for The Boston Globe and was an accomplished cook. Later in her life she was a book scout for Alfred A. Knopf, read manuscripts for Houghton Mifflin and worked in the dean’s office at Radcliffe College. The DeVotos’ many friends included Arthur Schlesinger, Walter Lippmann and their families.
“As Always, Julia” has a dramatic arc. It charts the beginnings of the book that would become “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” from when it was a gleam in the eye of Child and her co-authors Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck to their signing a contract (with Avis DeVoto’s help) for the book, then untitled, with Houghton Mifflin in 1954. The company ultimately rejected the book as being too unwieldy. Again with DeVoto’s help, it was published by Knopf. This book has an emotional arc too. Bernard DeVoto’s death from a heart attack in 1955, at 58, arrives out of the blue and is a devastating moment.
Most readers, however, will graze “As Always, Julia” for these women’s funny and forthright opinions about food and life. In an early letter Child describes herself to her new friend. “I had intended to be a great woman novelist,” she writes, “but for some reason The New Yorker didn’t ask me to be on its staff.”
About her body Child writes: “Bosom not as copious as she would wish, but has noticed that Botticelli bosoms are not big either. Legs O.K., according to husband. Freckles.”
Child and DeVoto bond most fully around food, and mostly share the same tastes. (“People who love to eat are always the best people,” Child writes.) They begin to trade items — knives, truffles, omelet pans — in the mail. DeVoto counsels Child on what’s available in American supermarkets. Fennel was widely found then only in drugstores, DeVoto reported, in dried form used for poultices. When DeVoto mailed her dried chives, Child was horrified by them: “Tastes like hay with onion flavor.”
They tweak each other too. DeVoto complains, in an early letter, when Child’s recipe for eggs pipérade has “too much fat in it.” Child shudders when DeVoto declares that she likes Accent seasoning. “I don’t use it at all as I sort of hate the idea,” Child writes. “But I am sure it is useful in the USA where vegetables have probably lost some of their freshness from being shipped under refrigeration for days and days.”
DeVoto read many drafts of Child’s book, and was an excellent first editor. She writes: “Page 5 — cleaning eggs. Wire wool — what do you mean? First place we never have eggs that dirty. Second place there’s steel wool only nobody uses it in kitchens any more — only for stripping paint and so on. Death on the hands.”
From the beginning, DeVoto recognized that “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — it was almost, at one point, titled “La Bonne Cuisine Française” — would be a “profound book.” This volume of letters makes it plain that it would never have appeared in the United States, at least in the form it did, without her devotion to it and to Child.
Later letters often deal with aging. “I like every part of growing older except what happens to your feet,” DeVoto writes. When she praises the efficacy of girdles, Child replies: “Paul” — Child’s husband — “doesn’t like them as he says a girdle buttocks is no fun to look at.”
DeVoto died in 1989, of pancreatic cancer. Child died in 2004. Their friendship lasted until the end. Both women agreed they wish they’d found each other, and their shared love for food, earlier in their lives.
“You know, it’s funny,” DeVoto wrote, wonderfully, to Child in 1954. “By the time we develop real taste in food, and begin to learn how to prepare it, digestive disorders set in and weight piles up. When I think what I could have done in my youth, when I ate like a horse with no bad results at all, with the knowledge I’m getting now, I could cry.”

The characters in this novel are facing bleak prospects, their plights hard and long... no surprise; it is an Oprah pick after all.

I hesistantly picked it up - 740 pages of bleakness is what I first thought. What can I say, I've read enough of Oprah's picks to know that sometimes the journey she's recommended I embark on will leave me with feelings of hopelessness.

But altogether it was not a bad read... there is a bit of redemption in the end but the author is true enough to the characters to not squeeze an ounce of happiness into that ending.

Despite what sounds like a negative review, I enjoyed the author's narrative style and perceptiveness... and I'll look up her other works.

Benjy, the littlest of the Fermoyles (the prinicipal cahracters of the book)... is such a beautiful character... wishing so hard for his mom's happiness. The mom's character is heart-breaking... she does have love... it just is trapped inside by the overwhelming pressures of daily routine and the constant threat of poverty.

It IS a long book and can be difficult to read with the threads of sadness and loneliness running through it. But each character’s struggles and motivations were so human and reflective of a time when society was quickly changing and a divorced mother had few choices (a woman could not get a loan or buy a car without a husband signing for it). It rang true from a psychological perspective as each character dealt with his or her individual desires and shame and projected these onto others. The only perceptive character was the con man who used the family’s fears and desires to his own advantage.

I challenge anyone who appreciates literature and character driven stories not to read "Songs in Ordinary Time!" The author had me from page one. As I read on I saw the genius in the writing. It was so profound yet easy to understand. It flowed off the page. It has a blush of the Robert Mitchum/Shelly Winters film "Night of the Hunter" to it. It takes place in a small town where everyone knows each other and the many ways their lives intersect. Very few of the characters are not inhabiting one circle or another in Dante's Inferno. Divorcée Marie is a lonely and broke mother of three. Her ex-husband was a heavy-duty alcoholic and deadbeat dad who drove the family crazy. She lets Omar Duvall, con man extrodinaire, into her home, heart and bed. All her children see through his sham and the folly of her actions. This is no Ordinary Song. It's an Extraordinary Song!

The title of this book is spot on. Strange things happen in life, all sorts of things in all sorts of ages. Some people learn from them and figure it out and move on and some people keep trying and some people don't. This book ends without an ending really. The main bad guy gets away, you never find out if Alice and Mooney ever go out, does the Dad ever finally kick the alcohol. I loved some people especially--The Dad, Alice and her brother, even the horny appliance store owner, sometimes even Mooney. They were flexible, they learned and kept trying. I think they believed in the important things and tried to do their best. This was just a story about life. It doesn't just end, there is always another story, another piece.... This is a long one and took me forever, but I kept hanging on because it was a great story about people.

I read this book all the way through, but I really hated it. There were no sympathetic characters, nothing redeeming, to me, about the story. Every character was sad and pathetic. I'd love to ask the author what on earth motivated her to write it!

First and foremost, this book was WAY too long. I am not against a long book, but 740 pages of the summer of 1960 in a small VT town where the action is either lacking, or repetitive, is excessive. What was the point? Morris could have left 200+ pages out of this book and no one would have known. The editor clearly did not do his/her job. Interesting, though universally depressing, characters, but again, why so many? It was not possible to keep up with them all, or care about them all. And a fatal error for me.....an easily checked anachronism that showed the lack of effort on the editor's part--a Mustang pulls into a gas station in the summer of 1960. One problem--Mustangs weren't introduced until 1964. Only stubbornness made me finish this book.

Songs is well written.

The characters are interesting.

The plot is believable.

The town is realistic.

And all of it is incredibly, incredibly depressing.

Not *one* single person in the entire book has a good life. Or even a reasonably happy one -- or a shot at happiness, at that. And the fact that it's well written does nothing to help the fact that it's painful to read about these pitiful little lives in this pitiful little town.

Even though it's set a decade and a half before my birth, maybe it just all rings too familiar. But I literally had to force myself to finish it.

The only good thing? I'm now done.

Excellent. A town of dysfunctional people, centered around a particularly dysfunctional family, penetrating and truthful, sometimes painfully so.

In the catholic rite, “ordinary time” is the period of the liturgical year when there are no specific celebrations - such as Christmas or Easter -coming up, priests wear common green robes and not the festive purple or white ones and only minor solemnities occur. Same as for people, it’s the longest period of the year in someone’s life, a normal, routinely period where you expect nothing special or exceptional to happen, but when most of your life and history actually occurs.
In this book we see the life of the small town of Atkinson, Vermont and of its inhabitants, apparently common anonymous people leading common, anonymous lives. It isn’t always so, though, strange things and vices lurk under the blanket of conformism.

We mostly follow the events in the Fermoyle’s family life.
The members of the Fermoyle family are so sadly pathetic one cannot help feeling annoyed at them and sympathetic at the same time, understanding them perfectly: there’s Marie, the single mother always in need of protection and status after her divorce from her drunken husband, jealous of the happy family next door, angry with the judging world around her, worried and bitter with her children, struggling to make ends meet all her life and feeling so lonely and helpless she foolishly falls for the first man who appears at her door; her children: the elder Alice dreams of running away from the small town but cannot find the courage to do it, too much of a good girl she is, her brother Norm, typical teenager cynical and unhappy, always ready to fight, the little one Benjy, struggling to keep things quiet, busy trying to avoid conflicts anywhere and anytime, eager to please so nobody will argue or get angry or sad. He’d rather keep silent than reveal unpleasant truths that could make his family even unhappier than usual - and making this way a real mess of things. I recognize a bit of myself in anyone of them. There is the ex-husband, the drunken father the children are ashamed of, who lives at his sister’s expenses, a miserable man, full of himself, who never managed to keep a job, always ready to blame someone else and unable (and most of all unwilling) to sober up and change his lifestyle, there are his bitter sister and deluded brother-in-law.
And then there is the village, with its bunch of hypocritical inhabitants, each one hiding a little nasty secret, every one pretending to be different and better than what they are. And finally there is the stranger coming from the outside, the mystery man ready to take advantage of them all, exploiting their weaknesses and cheating on everybody (particularly on poor Marie and her kids).
They are all so realistically miserable and unhappy you can’t really feel annoyed by them, not when the author is so good at describing their feelings and innermost thoughts, so that knowing all about them, all the reasons behinds their actions, in the end you cannot not feel sympathy (and pity) for everybody. After all we all are like that, never completely good not totally bad, trying to balance on a senseless existence and doing our best.
Mary McGarry Norris proves to have a deep knowledge of human nature, succeeding in getting into everybody’s shoes, even those of the priest with his doubts and anguish, of the teenage girl, of the frightened child, of the single mother.
And fortunately, in the very end, we can detect a tiny sparkle of hope, for the Fermoyles and all their neighbors, as the evil presence of Duvall finally vanishes and summer ends. Some are trying very hard to improve themselves and their lives and all of them have grown meantime, becoming more aware, closer together and readier to facing reality whatever it will be.

An advice: the book is a bit too long and at the beginning it seems a bit boring, so you have to endure and keep on reading before you can start really appreciating it and get into the story. Try and get to the second half, that’s when you won’t be able to put it down anymore.

really didn't get into this...it actually put me off Oprah picks for quite a while. It was well written, but depressing. It has been a while since I read it but I can remember wondering if anything good was ever going to happen.

I really loved this story. Not because it rambled, and may not have had a literary "meaning" but, because of the vivid character study of "Ordinary" people who have un-ordinary problems. I fell in love with them. Something that pleases me when I read. Something we all want when we curl up with a book.

As for the end-- (SORT OF A SPOILER) .... read on......


.......The end just was a white out. A disappointment, as if the author was not sure how to end this story of a family that suffered more than it should. It went nowhere-- I would love to see a sequel.

In the end, I would recommend this to the reader who reads and imagines things; who gets the abstract more than the set in stone norm. It's just a good, old fashioned story.