jennyshank's review against another edition
4.0
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2006/sep/07/after-this-by-alice-mcdermott/
After This, by Alice McDermott
Author conjures up another tour de force with post-WWII tale
Jenny Shank, Special to the News
Published September 7, 2006 at midnight
When Alice McDermott's novel Charming Billy beat out two sprawling tomes by literary heavyweights for the National Book Award in 1998 (Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Robert Stone's Damascus Gate), The New York Times described the victory as a "surprise." But those who had been following McDermott's career closely might not have been as shocked - two of her previous novels had been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and one made the short list for the NBA.
McDermott's new After This is another stellar novel - gripping, moving and beautifully observed and written. The book is all the more impressive because it deals with the simplest possible subject matter, the story of a typical American family in the post-World War II years.
McDermott is a magician, able to conjure a story that feels epic out of the materials of ordinary lives. Through the precise use of detail and exacting arrangement of revelation, she creates drama from events that in other writers' hands might seem mundane. McDermott's gift for underplaying the dramatic (such as a death of one of the characters) and spinning the quiet moments into grand meditations (such as a description of a long wait in an exhibit's line on a hot summer day) is what makes After This such a profound pleasure.
The novel opens with a section about an unusual day in the life of a woman named Mary, "thirty, with no husband in sight," who lives with her father and brother and works as a secretary in Manhattan. On this April day she meets John Keane, a World War II vet with a slight limp, the man who will become her husband, but McDermott teases the reader by beginning with a different man asking Mary out on a date.
She shows the still-virgin Mary feeling a flare of desire for a stranger. "And here she was past thirty, just out of church (a candle lit every lunch hour, still, although the war was over), and yearning now with every inch of herself to put her hand to the worn buckle at a stranger's waist."
McDermott skips forward in time with each chapter, joining the consciousness of various members of the Keane family, usually at moments when they are just on the cusp of change rather than amid the actual event. The second chapter begins with John and Mary married already for years, with three kids and another on the way, and McDermott weaves this back story into a meditative, melancholy account of a family trip to the beach at the end of summer.
She beautifully conveys John Keane's feelings on that day as he watches his kids play: "His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were - one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would need."
Throughout this chapter, McDermott intersperses details that may or may not indicate that John Keane is having a heart attack as his brother did before him, capturing the hypochondriac terror that everyone feels at the advent of a sudden, inexplicable pain.
As the kids grow up, the specter of the Vietnam War begins to loom. The Keane's oldest son's birthday comes up unlucky in the draft lottery. A neighbor, whose son has returned from the war mentally ruined, tells John to do everything in his power to keep his son from going. "Shoot him in the foot. Break his legs before you let him go."
Each chapter takes a different member of the Keane family as its primary subject, and is so finely crafted that most could stand on their own as short stories, but each also adds a layer to the larger narrative, plumbing the inner lives of the characters as gradually the perspectives and experiences of all the family members are revealed. The structure of After This is the perfect one to demonstrate how a family is at once a cohesive unit and a group composed of disparate individuals.
Throughout her story, McDermott consistently uses a sort of sleight of hand, building the reader's expectation that events will develop in a certain way, and then revealing the unforeseen outcome. McDermott's coquettishness with plot development is the perfect way to infuse an ordinary family's life with suspense for the reader: How will the kids turn out? Will the baby be all right? When and how will the characters die?
McDermott is toying with the reader's emotions a little, but no more so than life itself does. In After This, McDermott has condensed a significant swath of the 20th-century American experience into a slim, beautiful book, dispatching with efficient elegance a subject that might have moved other writers to verbosity.
After This
• By Alice McDermott. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 279 pages, $24.
• Grade: A
Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Image, CutBank, Calyx, Eureka Literary Magazine, Weber Studies and other journals. One of her pieces was listed among the "Notable Essays of the Year" in the Best American Essays. She lives in Boulder.
After This, by Alice McDermott
Author conjures up another tour de force with post-WWII tale
Jenny Shank, Special to the News
Published September 7, 2006 at midnight
When Alice McDermott's novel Charming Billy beat out two sprawling tomes by literary heavyweights for the National Book Award in 1998 (Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Robert Stone's Damascus Gate), The New York Times described the victory as a "surprise." But those who had been following McDermott's career closely might not have been as shocked - two of her previous novels had been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and one made the short list for the NBA.
McDermott's new After This is another stellar novel - gripping, moving and beautifully observed and written. The book is all the more impressive because it deals with the simplest possible subject matter, the story of a typical American family in the post-World War II years.
McDermott is a magician, able to conjure a story that feels epic out of the materials of ordinary lives. Through the precise use of detail and exacting arrangement of revelation, she creates drama from events that in other writers' hands might seem mundane. McDermott's gift for underplaying the dramatic (such as a death of one of the characters) and spinning the quiet moments into grand meditations (such as a description of a long wait in an exhibit's line on a hot summer day) is what makes After This such a profound pleasure.
The novel opens with a section about an unusual day in the life of a woman named Mary, "thirty, with no husband in sight," who lives with her father and brother and works as a secretary in Manhattan. On this April day she meets John Keane, a World War II vet with a slight limp, the man who will become her husband, but McDermott teases the reader by beginning with a different man asking Mary out on a date.
She shows the still-virgin Mary feeling a flare of desire for a stranger. "And here she was past thirty, just out of church (a candle lit every lunch hour, still, although the war was over), and yearning now with every inch of herself to put her hand to the worn buckle at a stranger's waist."
McDermott skips forward in time with each chapter, joining the consciousness of various members of the Keane family, usually at moments when they are just on the cusp of change rather than amid the actual event. The second chapter begins with John and Mary married already for years, with three kids and another on the way, and McDermott weaves this back story into a meditative, melancholy account of a family trip to the beach at the end of summer.
She beautifully conveys John Keane's feelings on that day as he watches his kids play: "His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were - one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would need."
Throughout this chapter, McDermott intersperses details that may or may not indicate that John Keane is having a heart attack as his brother did before him, capturing the hypochondriac terror that everyone feels at the advent of a sudden, inexplicable pain.
As the kids grow up, the specter of the Vietnam War begins to loom. The Keane's oldest son's birthday comes up unlucky in the draft lottery. A neighbor, whose son has returned from the war mentally ruined, tells John to do everything in his power to keep his son from going. "Shoot him in the foot. Break his legs before you let him go."
Each chapter takes a different member of the Keane family as its primary subject, and is so finely crafted that most could stand on their own as short stories, but each also adds a layer to the larger narrative, plumbing the inner lives of the characters as gradually the perspectives and experiences of all the family members are revealed. The structure of After This is the perfect one to demonstrate how a family is at once a cohesive unit and a group composed of disparate individuals.
Throughout her story, McDermott consistently uses a sort of sleight of hand, building the reader's expectation that events will develop in a certain way, and then revealing the unforeseen outcome. McDermott's coquettishness with plot development is the perfect way to infuse an ordinary family's life with suspense for the reader: How will the kids turn out? Will the baby be all right? When and how will the characters die?
McDermott is toying with the reader's emotions a little, but no more so than life itself does. In After This, McDermott has condensed a significant swath of the 20th-century American experience into a slim, beautiful book, dispatching with efficient elegance a subject that might have moved other writers to verbosity.
After This
• By Alice McDermott. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 279 pages, $24.
• Grade: A
Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Image, CutBank, Calyx, Eureka Literary Magazine, Weber Studies and other journals. One of her pieces was listed among the "Notable Essays of the Year" in the Best American Essays. She lives in Boulder.
pinkglemonade's review against another edition
2.0
The more I think about this book the less I like it. I understand what she was doing, and while I respected certain scenes (Mary and Annie waiting in line to see the statue) and the way she portrayed the mood with her style, I didn't enjoy it.
emmastens's review against another edition
3.0
After This is not the book that the paperback blurb promises it will be. Do not read this novel expecting that the plot will develop into a climax in which "the youngest, Clare, commits a stunning transgression after a childhood spent pleasing her parents"—in fact, do not read this novel expecting an explosive, stunning climax of any sort. This is not a juicy multi-generational drama. This is a novel about white Catholic middle-class people doing white Catholic middle-class things, and the gradual decline of that lifestyle's viability. This could be boring, if not for McDermott's refined, elegantly wrought prose.
This is a sparse, plot-light but time-rich novel: Virginia Woolf's influence looms heavily over the text, sometimes to a fault. Particularly towards the beginning of the novel, images of the wind that will eventually "scatter" the Keane children around the world feel too frequent and clunky, but as the novel progresses, McDermott learns how to distinguish herself from Woolf as opposed to imitating her, and this is where the novel improves. She distinguishes herself through class; after all, this is a middle-class novel, not an upper-class novel, and the daily habits and concerns can't quite be the same. The distinction between Woolf and McDermott is particularly evident in the following passage, in which the family patriarch attempts a [b:To the Lighthouse|59716|To the Lighthouse|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1346239665l/59716._SY75_.jpg|1323448]:-esque reflection:
Her characters ponder their place in the world, but also where they'll take their next vacation, or how the building of the church is getting on. McDermott is at her most observant, and most thoughtful, when she pinpoints the middle-class lifestyle and the way it is shaped by the passage of time and the demands of American life. The gaps in her narrative can sometimes feel lazy instead of purposeful, and the style occasionally derivative, but the observations on middle-class life make this a worthwhile read.
This is a sparse, plot-light but time-rich novel: Virginia Woolf's influence looms heavily over the text, sometimes to a fault. Particularly towards the beginning of the novel, images of the wind that will eventually "scatter" the Keane children around the world feel too frequent and clunky, but as the novel progresses, McDermott learns how to distinguish herself from Woolf as opposed to imitating her, and this is where the novel improves. She distinguishes herself through class; after all, this is a middle-class novel, not an upper-class novel, and the daily habits and concerns can't quite be the same. The distinction between Woolf and McDermott is particularly evident in the following passage, in which the family patriarch attempts a [b:To the Lighthouse|59716|To the Lighthouse|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1346239665l/59716._SY75_.jpg|1323448]:-esque reflection:
Man is immortal, John Keane thought, or he is not. And if he is, there’s the whole question of whom you pray to. If he’s not, then prayer is wishful thinking.
You either pray to the dead or you don’t.
But the real question before them this winter evening, the six men on the building committee, the pastor, the two priests, the architect, the account, and the dead, beloved pope who still smiled at them in oil from the end of the rectory dining room, was far simpler: Could they break ground in the spring?
Her characters ponder their place in the world, but also where they'll take their next vacation, or how the building of the church is getting on. McDermott is at her most observant, and most thoughtful, when she pinpoints the middle-class lifestyle and the way it is shaped by the passage of time and the demands of American life. The gaps in her narrative can sometimes feel lazy instead of purposeful, and the style occasionally derivative, but the observations on middle-class life make this a worthwhile read.
mmz's review against another edition
4.0
All in all, I really liked this book. The slow, languid pace somehow fits the story perfectly. My one complaint is that the story treats time almost like a stone skipping over water. At the end of one chapter, two people meet each other, and at the beginning of the next, they are married with three children and a fourth on the way. Then, suddenly, we are another 5 years or so in the future (references to WWII and the Vietnam War anchor the story generationally, but there's very little to give solid reference points as to how much time has passed from one point in the story to another). I understand that all the day-to-day details of family life are not the point of this book, but I did find it more satisfying when McDermott allowed us deeper into the lives of the Keane family rather than just skimming the surface.
allsmile's review against another edition
4.0
It took a while for me to get into this book. Someone saw me reading it 50 pages in and asked what it was about. I didn't know what to say. This isn't a plot driven book, there is no real beginning and no real ending. It is about a series of moments. Once I accepted that I began to cherish each scene. It isn't what I expected, and I may not have picked it up had I read some of the reviews, but I truly enjoyed this book.
gchiararo's review against another edition
4.0
Well written depiction of another time and the challenges of a woman raising a family.
eileen9311's review against another edition
4.0
Although I was mostly taken with this novel, the impact didn’t compare to that of the author’s latest work, The Ninth Hour. There were a couple of parts in After This I actually skimmed, but overall the book was enjoyable. Again, the author portrayed an Irish American community with a tender accuracy. Her descriptions are understated, yet powerful. She can bring the most ordinary moments to life! For instance, here’s the opening paragraph:
‘Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks – the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her skirt and the flying her of her skirt - felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves.’
Indeed a March day! And so much of her writing is like that! There reader is actually there, feeling one’s eyes sting from the wind on the blustery day. It’s a rare talent!
‘Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks – the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her skirt and the flying her of her skirt - felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves.’
Indeed a March day! And so much of her writing is like that! There reader is actually there, feeling one’s eyes sting from the wind on the blustery day. It’s a rare talent!
shalms's review against another edition
4.0
Exquisitely written. Sad and lovely all at the same time.
mimima's review against another edition
2.0
Through no fault of McDermott's, this was the second book in a row I read with the same annoying writing style. However, I did enjoy the plot and some of the characters, just never quite made the leap into absorbing due to an intentional vagueness.