Old Momma Towne, the widowed Irish matriarch of Alice McDermott's stunning new novel [At Weddings and Wakes], orchestrates the ceremonial gatherings of her four stepdaughters with a certain "papal dignity," the narrator tells us. She's a very Irish pope, to be sure. Of her daughter May's future husband's irritating habit of sending flowers, Momma Towne is as suspicious—and as unforgiving—as the proverbial Irish peasant. "Don't think I didn't notice," she announces in her brogue. "First of the month it's roses, last of the month daisies…. A man who runs out of money at the end of the month is no manager." Of the soon-to-be-married couple's unwary plans for the future—a future where inevitably every joy must be paid for in the hard currency of loss—Momma Towne is equally dismissive. "All of us moving out to Long Island with the grass and the trees. A regular vision of heaven," she says with her bitter wit. "It wouldn't hurt him to show a little more caution."

Weaned on Momma Towne's ruminative resentments, her stepdaughters—especially Lucy, mother of the three children whose wide eyes and sharp ears bring us into this enchanted world—can nurse a grievance with the same fierce devotion that their men milk a bottle of whiskey. Unsatisfactory marriage, alcoholism, disfigurement, and early death all haunt this stolid, intense, striving middle-class family. "My husband died right outside this apartment door," Momma Towne is fond of recalling, like a priest pronouncing the words of consecration. Her sister, her husband's first wife, died in childbirth in the same apartment. Her son John, handsome and fatally charming, has been exiled for his incorrigible drinking, relegated to an annual Christmas visit. So when Momma and her stepdaughters—Aunt May, Agnes, and Veronica still live at home—gather in her dark, cluttered Brooklyn apartment, there are many spirits to be appeased.

As a family the Towne women are a formidable and brooding presence. More than anything else, it is their "easy access to regret" that sets them apart and endows them with spiritual authority. That regret is also, irrevocably, a shared history and very much a corporate identity. Without it, they would be cut off both from what joy they can hope for as well as, paradoxically, from their deepest, most individual selves.

Bob Dailey, Lucy's husband, shrewdly evaluates the source of Momma's hurtful affections in telling the story of her prodigal son.

Not, their father was now saying into the darkness as he drove, because of all the torment John had put Momma through in his wild days, oh no. That was not what had so thoroughly hardened her heart. What had done it, what had made her mad as hell, he said, was that the bastard had stopped. "She feels the same way about God."

McDermott is an elegant stylist who can tell a story from a variety of points of view, and she can get away with such luxurious sentiments and sentences. At Weddings and Wakes is a complex narrative that beguiles with the strong rhythm of its prose and the almost liturgical movement of its story. The novel opens with a bravado set piece in which the three young Dailey children are led by their fitful mother on the magical journey from their suburban home to Momma's fourth-floor walk-up. It is a journey in time and history as well as geography. Momma Towne's apartment is the focus of family life and lore, a shrine where a sacred creed is faithfully recited. As with the opening scene in McDermott's previous novel, That Night, which propels the reader into the lives of an otherwise unexceptional teen-age couple, At Weddings and Wakes immediately sweeps the reader into the numinous world of the Townes. McDermott turns the homely artifacts of everyday life—in this case Chiclets, butterscotch Life Savers, Syrian bread, the Reader's Digest and old Playbill magazines—into talismans and portents. While an unearthly light and shadow suffuse the streets and rooms, the smells, sounds, and voices of a familiar American landscape establish the thick texture of these lives.

Set in the early 1960s, the routines of the kitchen, followed by the small formalities of the "cocktail cart" anchor daily life. We are also given a glimpse of the strained intimacies of more traditional family gatherings. McDermott kneads this domestic experience in a way that seeks to hold seeming opposites—sisterly love and jealousy, motherly pride and resentment, transience and timelessness—in tension. The Townes do not so much rise above circumstance and history as they hallow them. McDermott is intent on evoking the timelessness present in every passing moment; on reclaiming the past that, though seemingly invisible, colors every present emotion and thing.

In this shadowy world lineage carries weight—we inherit both strengths and weaknesses, and often our strength is also our weakness. As Reynolds Price has written, "Nobody under forty can believe how nearly everything's inherited." What the Townes inherit circumscribes their hopes, but is equally a gift—and can never be one without the other. It is unusual to read a contemporary novel so knowing in its acceptance of the boundedness of individual life and of life itself. "Love me, love my parents; love what I come from and what I will, with no more choice or volition, become," the narrator observed in That Night. At Weddings and Wakes seems an imaginative exploration of that sense of intergenerational identity, a turning away from the contemporary promise of self-determination toward the more lasting satisfactions of human connectedness and continuity. In so doing, the novel is eager to show how people are as much tied to one another by shared loss as by any transitory triumph or joy.

This is most poignantly realized in the penultimate chapter, where the wedding of May—a former nun who unexpectedly finds love in middle age—is refracted through the reader's increasingly focused knowledge of the bride's impending death.

There is nothing unique or particularly exhilarating about May's modest church wedding and reception. At the party, barely pubescent cousins sneak into the liquor, children scout out adult duplicities, the unwanted solicitousness of little-known relatives goes undeflected, mothers and fathers drink and dance with a youthful intimacy, and the dark corners of family history and the usual salacious gossip are given new life. All the familiar, sentimental songs are played and the traditional dances danced.

McDermott is meticulous with all the dowdy details of this unpretentious middle-class rite. At the same time, however, what is disconnected and incomplete about human love and life is miraculously made whole through the frame May's death imposes on the scene. Despite the brokenness and gentle absurdity of the individual lives involved, May's wedding/wake comes to transcend all temporal confusion. By allowing us to see May's ordinary happiness through the sharp focus of her death a mere four days away—a death as inexplicable as the love she had only recently found—McDermott returns us to the timelessness not of grand achievements, but of the humblest human desires, even failings.

This search for "what part of love remains" in the face of death and the erosion of time was a crucial theme in That Night. "Peace was annihilation and to say that love could fade, that loss could heal, was to admit forever that there would be no return of the dead," imagined one teenage protagonist. The dead are very much with us, thanks to the Towne women. Indeed, we are incomplete without them, or so thinks the otherwise gently skeptical Bob Dailey.

But there was something they [the Towne women] gave him, too, with all their ghosts, something he couldn't deny: they provided his ordinary day, his daily routine of office, home, cocktails, dinner, homework, baths, and twenty minutes of evening news with an undercurrent—it was like the low music that now played on the kitchen radio—that served as some constant acknowledgement of the lives of the dead. He was not so much unlike them, there were among the dead people he loved and missed and would not set his eyes on again, and the women's constant chorus of anger acknowledged that for him….

At Weddings and Wakes reminded me of Joyce's great story "The Dead," with its haunting winter light and landscape, sharp social observation, and tribute to the bittersweet redemptions memory, desire, and longing afford. In "The Dead," the accident of hearing an old ballad calls a middle-aged woman back to the sharp passion of an adolescent love that ended in death. The dead never leave us, Joyce seems to be saying, for in our "last end" we all share a common fate and perhaps even an imperishable identity. "One by one they were all becoming shades…. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwinding."

Alice McDermott takes us to very much the same place—even amid the tacky sincerity of suburban Long Island!—where the seemingly solid things of this world crumble before the elusive powers of human remembering and longing. At weddings and weakes we are allowed to say "forever."