In his powerful and significant debut novel, Thomas masterfully evokes one woman's life in the context of a brilliantly observed Irish working-class milieu. Eileen Tumulty was born in the early '40s, the only child and dutiful caretaker of alcoholic parents. As a young woman, she hopes to leave her family's dingy apartment in Woodside, Queens, and move up the social ladder. Eileen falls in love with and marries Ed Leary, a quiet neuroscientist whom she sees as the means to an upper-middle-class future. But Ed is dedicated to pure scientific research, and he turns down lucrative job offers from pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions. The couple's apartment in Jackson Heights is a step up from Eileen's parents' apartment, but she wants a home in tony Westchester County. Later, Eileen pursues an arduous career as a nursing administrator to secure a future for their son, Connell. But once she gets her gracious but dilapidated fixer-upper in Bronxville, in southern Westchester, Ed is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and the family slowly endures "the encroaching of a fathomless darkness." Thomas works on a large canvas to create a memorable depiction of Eileen's vibrant spirit, the intimacy of her love for Ed, and the desperate stoicism she exhibits as reality narrows her dreams. Her life, observed over a span of six decades, comes close to a definitive portrait of American social dynamics in the 20th century. Thomas's emotional truthfulness combines with the novel's texture and scope to create an unforgettable narrative. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

An Irish-American family in New York City pursues simple dreams in a long and only partially satisfying first novel.Thomas' debut opens promisingly with the outsize character of Big Mike Tumulty, an Irish immigrant and bar-stool sage possessed of "a terrible charisma." The humor and brisk pace of this well-drawn section too rarely recur in the many dry, dour pages that follow. Mike's daughter and the book's heroine, Eileen, arrives in 1941 and grows up in a household where affection and money are scarce. She pursues a nursing career, marries a teacher named Ed Leary and has a son, Connell. Eileen is driven to improve their housing, from rented rooms in a multifamily Queens home to owning that home and finally the big move to the costly suburb of Bronxville. Only a few pages later, at the book's midpoint, they learn that Ed, at 51, has early-onset Alzheimer's, "the most virulent kind.It dismantles motor functions and speech as it erases the memory." Thomas, who has relied to this point on thinly linked vignettes, is most effective in the sustained picture of Ed's terrible decline and Eileen's fierce struggle to maintain his dignity and her control. And a story almost painfully confined to the family trio now acquires a couple of colorful characters in a healer who speaks through the spirit Vywamus and a hired man named Sergei who offers strength and the chance of new passion.Despite its epic size and aspirations, the novel is underpopulated and often underwritten, a quality that does make its richer moments stand out while stoking the appetite for more of those in fewer pages. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

AS A YOUNG WOMAN training for a graduate degree in nursing administration, Eileen Tumulty longs for the day when she will marry and take another name. It's the thoroughgoing Irishness of Tumulty, with its redolence of "peat bogs and sloppy rebel songs" and deep defeat, from which she yearns to detach herself. She wants the sort of bland, decorous WASP name that will label her as an unhyphenated American. Bright, attractive and strong-willed, Eileen is passionately ambitious, determined to shake off the poverty-haunted, alcohol-ridden atmosphere of her childhood and achieve not only wealth and comfort but a sense of belonging. Shame is the deeply buried force that drives her. Although Matthew Thomas's "We Are Not Ourselves" tells the story of three generations of an Irish-American family, the action is seen mainly from Eileen's point of view. She meets Edmund Leary, the man she is to marry, on a blind date on New Year's Eve, an outing she has been vociferously resisting. But as her roommate invites their two dates inside their apartment, Eileen thinks she hears both softness and strength in Ed's voice. And sure enough, he seems to have an appealing gravity, an admirable seriousness of purpose. He knows she didn't have to come on this date, he whispers in her ear, but he promises to make it worth her time. At these words, "her heart kicked once like an engine turning over on a wintry afternoon." Ed is a scientist, a brain expert, with a special interest in the effects of psychotropic drugs on neural functioning. As they become a couple, Eileen sees a bright and prosperous future before them. However, what neither realizes is that they want very different things from life. When Merck offers Ed a lab of his own, with state-of-the-art equipment and a team of assistants, he turns it down in favor of a quiet life of teaching and scholarship. The same thing happens some years later, when he's offered the deanship of Bronx Community College. Though Eileen makes her feelings very clear, he refuses that job as well. While she pictures the beautiful American life that's within their grasp, her spouse stubbornly refuses to budge. There are bitter quarrels about Ed's career, and yet, as Eileen reflects after many years and almost indescribable travail, she understands that she had never believed in something called love until she met Ed Leary. It was when she was dancing with him on that fateful New Year's Eve, and he kissed her. It was then that she experienced a sensation she had always thought of as "malarkey," the sense that "everyone around them had disappeared, and it was just the two of them." It is this deep, abiding love that is put to a terrible test when Ed is found to have Alzheimer's disease, at the age of 51. Here the novel takes a darker turn as Eileen struggles with increasing desperation to keep Ed with her and out of a nursing home. The novel's description of the remorseless progress of the illness - more aggressive at this time of life - reads like a tortuous descent into hell. It is one of fate's cruelties that an expert on the brain should slowly succumb to this particular illness. Amazingly, however, "We Are Not Ourselves" isn't ultimately depressing. Written in calm, polished prose, following one family as its members journey through the decades in an American landscape that is itself in flux, it's a long, gorgeous epic, full of love and life and caring. It's even funny, in places - and it's one of the best novels you'll read this year. MAGGIE SCARF is the author of "Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage" and "The Remarriage Blueprint."

Starred Review. This epic and emotionally draining novel is centered on the life of Eileen Tumulty who lives in Queens, NY, in the mid-20th century. An only child of Irish parents, Eileen is smart and ambitious and looking for a better life for herself. She's moving ahead in her career in nursing when she meets and marries Ed Leary, a PhD student in neurochemistry who decides he will teach at a community college despite more lucrative and prestigious offers. As years go by and the neighborhood changes, Eileen is desperate to move from their multiple-family home to the suburbs, but the entrenched and increasingly eccentric Ed is adamant about staying put. The house they finally move to is beyond their means and needs work, and though Ed has the skills, it soon becomes apparent that the project is beyond him. A doctor's visit reveals deeper trouble that presages Ed's long, slow, painful decline. VERDICT The debut author has created a memorable character in Eileen, who is both intelligent and clueless, focusing on her ideals and fantasies and attempting vainly to make reality conform to her aspirations. The depiction of Ed's illness is realistic, powerful, artistically delivered, and occasionally humorous, and readers will be drawn in. [See Prepub Alert, 3/3/14; see also Thomas's address to librarians at an S. & S. Adult Librarian Preview, p. 90.] James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.