"Saints for All Occasions," by J. Courtney Sullivan

J. Courtney Sullivan has won me over again and again with each of her dramas of friends and families, all sweeping novels: “Commencement” (2009), “Maine” (2011), “The Engagements” (2013), and now “Saints for All Occasions” (Knopf, 2017). In each case, I was a little suspicious of the novels’ being “chick lit” (not that I necessarily have a problem with that genre, if indeed it is a genre, although I do have a problem with the label, as I have written about before with ambivalence…). All four novels tell good stories, ones that make you want to keep reading (for example, I read this latest 300+ page novel in one and a half days during a long holiday weekend); they are about well-developed characters, they have a strong sense of place, the stories play out over many years, they are realistic and compelling, and -- very important to me -- relationships are always the focus. The two main characters are sisters, Nora and Theresa, who leave Ireland in the 1950s as very young women to go to the United States in search of better lives. The story tells something of their lives in Ireland, but most of the novel is set in the U.S., especially Boston and surroundings, with brief side trips to Vermont and to New York. We get to know the sisters’ many relatives, and we see their lives diverging after a dramatic event, a secret that affects the sisters and other family members for decades. Well-delineated are the spouses, children, houses, jobs, lives and deaths in the story, all extraordinarily vivid and real. Nora is a particularly vivid presence. A bonus and a very good sign for me was the blurb by one of my favorite authors (see my very recent post of 6/3/17), Richard Russo, in which he called “Saints for All Occasions” “strong and wise and beautiful and heartbreaking.” If Richard Russo says so, I will never argue, and after reading this compelling novel, I have no inclination to do so.