SOURCE: "The Lessons of Loss Learned in Childhood," in The New York Times, March 24, 1992, p. C15.

In the following review, Kakutani praises McDermott's use of children as narrators in At Weddings and Wakes and her thematic focus on loss.

Alice McDermott's last novel, the critically acclaimed That Night, used the story of a doomed teen-age romance to create a resonant portrait of suburban life in the early 1960's: a lyrical and haunting portrait that left the reader with an indelible sense of life's precariousness, the ephemerality of youth and passion and hope.

The same sense of lost innocence and betrayed dreams lingers in the wake of her latest book, At Weddings and Wakes, a beautifully wrought novel that depicts three generations of an Irish Catholic family in New York through the eyes of three young children. Though the child's point of view and the time frame—the early...