Maggie-Now by Betty Smith

 I’ve read this several times, but this bittersweet, moving story still made me cry. It’s not as good as her masterpiece, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but it’s still another wonderful Irish Catholic Brooklyn novel with memorable characters. They’re like friends that you don’t want to part with by the end of the book.

Our story begins when Pat, a young man in Ireland, fancies the beautiful Maggie Rose. No one is going to tie Pat down, however, and his doting mother agrees, so she helps him ‘escape’ to New York where he finds life much tougher than it ever was in Ireland. There, he comes to regret not marrying Maggie, who didn’t waste her precious time waiting for him, but he marries the boss’s daughter, gets a steady job, and makes a life for himself. She dies young, however, and Maggie-Now, wild as a child, ends up taking care of her father, and her little brother. She puts her foot down, though, when she meets the charismatic and Protestant Claude, who she ends up marrying. It’s a mostly happy marriage, but Claude finds Catholicism unreasonable, and disappears for a long time each year…

Although Maggie could seem far too submissive to today’s readers, who might get fed up with her, she’s still a delightful character. She’s very loving, caring, and understanding. She’s not ambitious, a reader and a deep thinker like the feisty Francie of A Tree Grows, however, so it’s easy to see why that book is more popular. Claude’s harder to like, but you can see his point of view about the Catholicism of the time, and he’s a complicated character, because of his upbringing.

As always, Betty Smith has plenty to say about Catholicism. Maggie-Now’s mother dies, because the child’s life was given preference, and there’s a lot of discussion about the ‘rules’. Maggie feels unduly guilty when she wonders how it would have been if she’d married a young policeman, a good Catholic boy. Father Flynn, the parish priest, is a sensitive, understanding character, though, so the author also praises the Catholic faith to some extent.

I think that this is the second-best of Betty Smith’s novels. My mother enjoyed it too, but not as much as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She especially enjoyed the criticisms of Catholicism, which annoyed me!

I read this for Rose City Reader’s TBR 26 in 26 Challenge.

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