While the narrative portrays fragmentary incidents from the lives of a number of characters, the central interest is in the history of the marriage of Ellen and Vincent MacNamara. Ellen, married for sixty-six years to Vincent, has lived sixty-three of them in this house in Queens, and is facing her death after a series of strokes. Her experience of family life in Ireland has made her a passionate hater. Her mother, having suffered a series of stillbirths and miscarriages, went insane and was put away by her father in a country house in the care of another woman. Ellen, witnessing the bloody evidence of her mother's miscarriages, blames her father's selfishness. Ellen's emigration is both an escape and a form of revenge against her father, who wished her to carry on the business after his death. In America Ellen marries, works, and becomes a political activist in liberal...