The Irish Catholics of the New York region are Alice McDermott's stock in trade, and she returns to them with a dampened yet confident flourish in her latest book. There's less humor here than in her National Book Award?winning Charming Billy (1998), but reviewers note a more assured touch than in her previous book Child of My Heart (HHH Mar/Apr 2003). Most critics feel that McDermott's use of narrative vignettes pays off, but a few detractors note that the compressed nature of the story provokes some confusion, both about the story and her thematic intent. In the end, though, all agree that McDermott's phenomenal fictional gifts are on good display.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
*Starred Review* Word by word, metaphor by metaphor, McDermott writes the most exquisitely perceptive and atmospheric fiction published today. Heir to Woolf and Nabokov, she nets the totality of human consciousness in flawlessly rendered internalized fiction shaped by bemused delight in human nature and an abiding understanding of the rule of opposites: not only do opposites attract, the opposite of what you expect is bound to happen. In her sixth and most commanding novel, National Book Award-winning McDermott continues to till her verdant fictional home ground, Irish-Catholic family life on Long Island, in an extraordinarily refined through-the-decades family saga. The story begins as Mary steps out of church on a wildly windy day at the close of World War II and hurries into a diner, never imagining as she sits at the counter that she will soon marry the stranger beside her and with him raise two sons and two daughters. As their lives unfold, every beautifully rendered occurrence resonates deeply on both personal and social planes, from a tree toppled by a hurricane to quietly hilarious classroom scenes; a premature birth, an abortion, and a high-school pregnancy; a visit to the 1964 World's Fair to see Michelangelo's Pieta; a son serving in Vietnam; and a life-changing college year abroad. Encompassing and radiant, McDermott's breathtaking novel ends as it begins with a church scene and an unexpected marriage. Astutely attuned to the spiritual consequences of a rapidly metamorphosing world and the mysteries of desire, love, faith, family, and friendship, McDermott elucidates all that changes and all that endures with wondrous specificity and plentitude of heart. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Again and again, After This moves toward revelation and then modestly, modernly, pulls back, but not without a memory of what it glimpsed.”—New Yorker
“Ms. McDermott gives us an affecting meditation on the consolations and discontents of family life.… And her easy authority with this material, combined with her clear-eyed sympathy for her characters, results in a moving, old-fashioned story about longing and loss and sorrow.”—The New York Times
“It is hard to know how to start piling on praise for this gripping, poignant book….Before we are aware of what McDermott has done, we are completely engaged….Like magic, we are drawn in.”—Chicago Tribune
“A master at capturing Irish-Catholic American suburban life . . . [McDermott] flawlessly encapsulates an era in the private moments of one family’s life.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Word by word, metaphor by metaphor, McDermott writes the most exquisitely perceptive and atmospheric fiction published today. Heir to Woolf and Nabokov, she nets the totality of human consciousness.”—Booklist
“After five penetrating novels and a National Book Award, McDermott infuses the undulating plot with the knowledge that lives become most vivid in small moments of connection . . . Genuinely moving yet amorphous, like a remembered fragrance that you can’t quite place.”—Kirkus Reviews
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Alice McDermottis the author of five previous novels, including Child of My Heart; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; and At Weddings and Wakes, all published by FSG. She lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.
From The Washington Post
In one of her bracing essays about writing, Flannery O'Connor says, "There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift." It is no secret that Alice McDermott, winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Charming Billy, is a writer of many talents, but to read her new novel, After This, is to be reminded how rare her gifts are. McDermott country is Long Island, 1940 to the present, and her people Irish Catholics: parents, spinster aunts, alcoholic relatives and always observant children who must grow beyond the safe-keeping of their parents. In After This, McDermott continues to pose her perennial questions: Does the lie that is faith, that is romance, that is poetry, make ordinary life better or worse? How best can a person survive disappointments, sorrows and also blessings day after day? How do we preserve our love for the dead when we can obtain only a limited amount of solace from telling stories about them?
The questions in After This are framed by the Keane family, whose six members are the major characters of the novel. In the first pages Mary and her future husband, John Keane, meet at the lunch counter at Schrafft's in the 1940s, and we then follow the couple and their children through several decades. The book is about what George Eliot called the great "home epic," everything that takes place in the family during the course of a lifetime: war, love, marriage, birth, more war and the occasional turn of fate that gives each person a particular story.
McDermott has always written relatively short novels. Again in After This there is no excess, no look-at-me pyrotechnics in her prose; with the mastery of a poet, she distills the life of the Keanes to its essence. Her method is familiar, going back and forth in time to reveal the story and the meaning bit by bit, as she peels back from the surface to the point of revelation. Early on, when a neighbor, Mr. Persichetti, appears in the yard, happening by just before Mary collapses in labor, McDermott skips years ahead to the most politically charged line in the book: Mr. Persichetti tells John Keane to shoot his son in the foot so he won't have to go to Vietnam. That line recurs, in its proper sequence, coming like a refrain, gathering power in the second telling.
McDermott is at the height of her powers here, charging her seemingly ordinary scenes with the possibility of danger, of terror or mystery and, on occasion, radiance. She does so with the lightest touch, with the silkiest humor, and yet at the same time she probes deeply into the moment. And so there is suspense when a professor plies an earnest student with whisky, when the Keane children play with toy soldiers on a windy dune, when a group of college boys argue about Halloween decorations in a bar, when a spinster rides a bus at night.
Several of McDermott's novels have a mythic quality, and this one achieves that mark most keenly. McDermott's narrators are often family members -- a daughter, a group of children or the neighbor child -- narrators who, although present, do not have much of a role in the story. The telling is what we know of the narrator, and so narrative and narrator seem to merge. After This is written in the third person, the familiar McDermott voice narrating at a further remove than usual, so that the novel, while rooted in the 1960s and '70s, has a timeless, once-upon-a-time feel.
The oldest Keane child, Jacob, a quiet, fragile boy, goes off to Vietnam, but McDermott does not devote a discrete section of the novel to his tragic experience. Rather, his story is embedded in details throughout the book: in the neighbor's experience in the war; in the story of Jacob's namesake, who died in the trenches in France; prefigured in his mother's viewing of Michelangelo's Pieta at the New York World's Fair, when Jacob is still a child. The war is there on the dune when the little boys play with toy soldiers and again when they climb in the jungle of a fallen tree in their yard. Jacob's time in Vietnam is not specifically told because it is a story, after all, that is as common as dust: a boy killed for nothing far from home. That void in the novel, and the fact that Jacob lives only in the grief of his family, make his loss all the more sorrowful.
McDermott has little need to discuss the war or the times because she is so good at depicting the political in personal terms, capturing the '60s in gesture and speech. One of the many affecting scenes takes place in a high school classroom: a nun tries to talk about abortion and women's duty to family to the girls, including Claire Keane, while "two or three were staring cross-eyed at the ends of their long hair." After a short but tense discussion about abortion, Sister Lucy reflects that at her students' age "she had craved piety, undaunted innocence, even naiveté. Now, worldliness was all they wanted. Sophistication." As the nun struggles to give the girls an understanding of what lies before them, they become wary, uncertain, dismissive. Sister Lucy likens the men who legislate abortion to Medea -- all of them murderers -- and she then pits the lot of them against the story of her noble mother, who single-handedly raised a brood of children and died tired. Her message is brutal, as is the girls' scorn for their teacher. Claire does not know it yet, but that discussion will resonate later in her life.
The tension of that chapter, of what has come before and the mystery of what comes after, is nothing less than thrilling. If McDermott were asked by a stranger, someone who doesn't read widely, "Oh, so you're a writer. Do you write romance or mystery?" she could honestly answer, "Thrillers, yes, thrillers are what I write."
In several scenes piano music in the background gives structure to the characters' lovemaking, their conversations, their rituals. At one point a priest, listening to a student playing, thinks, "There were the ordinary pianists who played, no doubt, as they had been taught to play . . . and then there was a kid like this, who played in a trance . . . not the engine for the instrument but a conduit for some music that was already there, that had always been there, in the air." The priest asks if the boy had taken a lot of lessons, or if he'd always been able to play.
" 'Both,' he said politely. 'A lot of lessons, but it seems I've always known how to play.' "
That surely is true of Alice McDermott, someone who must always have been listening, waiting for a way to use her exquisite sensory recall of childhood, waiting to craft everything she knows into another beautiful and stirring novel. All her books are touched with the grace of her generous intelligence, her sly wit and her compassion for our longings, our griefs and the revelations that come only in the briefest of glimmers. The opportunities for revelation are greater because we have books such as this one, because of McDermott's quiet and sublime gift.
Reviewed by Jane Hamilton
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from After This by Alice McDermott. Copyright © 2006 by Alice McDermott. Published in September 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
I
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 hat and the flying hem of her skirt--felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves.
And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?--office memos? shopping lists? The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?
She squinted against the sunlight on taxi hoods and bus windows, heard the rushing now of air and of taxis, wheezing buses, and underneath it all something banging--a loosened street sign, a trapped can, a distant hammer--rhythmic and methodical. The march of time.
And then George approaching, his hand stuck to his hat and the hat bent into the onslaught. She went down the steps just in front of him, drawn more by forward momentum than by any desire to meet up with, or to avoid, her brother's latest best pal.
The cold wind made it difficult to breathe, as if it could snatch your next breath before you had time to swallow it, and she bent her head, too, hand to her hat, submerged in wind and beginning to imagine herself slowly losing ground with each step forward, slowly beginning to stall, and then to sail backward--a quick scramble to regain ground and then another sailing backward. In church she had prayed for contentment. She was thirty, with no husband in sight. A good job, an aging father, a bachelor brother, a few nice friends. At least, she had asked--so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously--let me be content.
And now a slapstick windstorm fit for Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton.
It was either God's reply or just April again, in the wind tunnel that was midtown Manhattan. The scent of it, the Easter scent of April in the city, all around her, in the cold air itself as well as on the shoulders of the crowd; the smell of sunlight and dirt, something warming at the heart of it all.
And then she felt his hand on her shoulder and he shouted, "Mary Rose," which bound him forever to her brother and her father and her life at home since nowhere else did she tolerate the double name. His head was still lowered, his hand still on his hat--he might have been waiting for the right opportunity to doff it--and he peered around at her from under its brim as if from under the rock of another life.
And she, her hand on the back of her own hat, did the same.
"Hello, George," she said. She could feel the crunch of city grit between her back teeth.
"Some wind," he said. He had one eye closed against it, the other was watery.
"You're telling me," she said.
They walked together to the corner and as they stepped off the curb, he suddenly reached up and took her raised elbow--the one that led to the hand she held against her hat--and kept it between his fingers as they crossed. She thought he must look like a man attached to a subway strap. At the next corner, he did the same; a gesture that was either brotherly or proprietary, but awkward either way, as if one of them were blind or doddering, or as if both were involved in some odd, raised-elbow folk dance. At Forty-sixth, the light was against them and the wind paused enough for her to take her hand off her hat while they waited with the crowd.
She turned to him--was he going to speak? His eyes were teary from the wind, red-rimmed and bloodshot. His nose was running and there were tears on his windblown cheeks. She clicked open the purse that hung on her arm and found her handkerchief, but he refused it, reaching into his overcoat for his own. He mopped his face and blew his nose before the crowd got them moving again and as they got to the curb, she placed her left hand on her hat so he could reach her elbow at a more convenient angle--which he did, guiding her across the street as if she were a novice pedestrian, and this time, perhaps, putting a little more pressure behind the fingertips that held her.
"Where are you headed, George?" she asked him. He shouted something unintelligible into the wind.
"Have you eaten yet?" she asked, because it was only polite. And then the wind paused completely, as it will in April, a sudden silence and maybe even the hint of warmth from the sun, so that he replied with odd gentleness, "Yeah, I had my lunch."
They were at the door of the restaurant. The wind was picking up again. "Would you like some coffee?" she asked.
He shook his head and she could not deny her own relief. "I'm out of time," he said. And then added, "What about dinner?"
"Lamb chops," she told him. "You coming over?" Anticipating already a stop at the butcher's to pick up two or three more.
He shook his head. There was another tear streaming down his windblown cheek and as he replied she lifted the handkerchief in her hand and wiped it away, feeling the not unpleasant pull of his beard against the thin cotton.
He said, "I mean, what about us having dinner?"
The wind puffed up again and they both put their hands to their hats. "Where?" she said, rudely, she realized later. But it was like having a passing stranger suddenly turn to sing you an aria. Anyone would have a second or two of not quite knowing what was really going on.
"Out," he told her. He was a broad-faced man who looked good in hats. Who looked better now than he did at home, where he had been thus far only the unremarkable source of her brother Jimmy's unpredictable enthusiasms. "At a restaurant," he said. And then to make himself clearer, "The two of us."
"Tonight?" she said, and then they both turned away for a moment from the peppered wind. When they turned back, he said, "Why not?" but without conviction, confirming for them both that this was a sudden impulse that most likely would not last out the afternoon. "What if I come by at seven?" he said.
She paused, squinting, not for the chance to see him better but for him to see her. "I'll have to cook those lamb chops anyway," she said. "Or else Jimmy and my father will be gnawing the table legs by the time I get home."
He smiled a little, unable to disguise what she was sure was a bit of confusion about his own impulse. He said again, "I'll come by at seven," and then turned back into the wind.
She pushed open the door to the restaurant. More lunchtime bustle, mostly women in hats with their coats thrown over the backs of chairs, the satiny linings and the fur collars and cuffs, the perfume and the elegant curves of the women's backs as they leaned forward across the small tables, all giving the hint of a boudoir to the busy place. She found a seat at the counter, wiggled her way into it. Saw the man beside her who was finishing a cigarette give her a quick up and down from over his shoulder and then turn back to flick an ash onto the remains of his sandwich. She imagined returning his dismissive stare, and then maybe even letting her eyes linger distastefully on the crust of bread and the bitten dill pickle and the cigarette debris on his plate. She could slide the ashtray that was right there between them a little closer to his elbow--hint, hint. Emboldened, perhaps--was she?--by the fact that she'd just been asked out on a date.
She ordered a sandwich from the waitress, whose pretty youth was still evident in the doughy folds of her weary and aging face, and a cup of tea. And then she held her hands over the steaming water for a few seconds. Thin hands, long fingers, with a kind of transparency to the chapped skin. Her mother's gold ring, inset with a silver Miraculous Medal, on her right hand. The man beside her rubbed his cigarette into the plate, then stood, swinging away from her on the stool and causing a slight ripple through the customers all along the other side of him. He took his overcoat from the hat rack and put it on standing just behind her, and then leaned across his empty stool, brushing her arm, to leave a few coins under his plate.
"Overcoats in April," he said. "Some crazy weather."
She turned to him, out of politeness, the habit of it. "I've never seen such wind," she said.
He was handsome enough--dark eyes and a nice chin, though his hair was thinning. He wore a dark overcoat and a dark suit, a white shirt and a tie, and there was the worn shine of a brass belt buckle as he reached for his wallet. "Reminds me of some days we had overseas," he said, taking a bill from his billfold.
She frowned, reflexively. "Where were you?"
He shook his head, smiled at her. Something in his manner seemed to indicate that they knew each other, that they'd had such conversations before. "In another life," he said and snapped the bill and slapped the wallet and returned it to his pocket with a wink that said, But all that's behind us now, isn't it? He was thin and his stomach was taut and his starched white shirt was smooth against his chest and belly. The brass belt buckle, marked with decorative lines, a circled initial at its center, was worn to a warm gold. "Once more into the breach," he said, turning up his collar. "Wish me luck."
...
McDermott's highly acclaimed sixth novel, a story of a postwar middle-class family that unfurls over decades, is full of the stuff of everyday life. Her small scenes of acutely observed family interactions gather their potency as the book develops, though they rarely seem eventful in themselves. Martha Plimpton expertly handles McDermott's habit of providing unhurried detail. As a reader, Plimpton is both energetic and precise--important qualities given McDermott's intricate use of sentences that unspool their meaning phrase by phrase. Elegant and formal when McDermott's writing is elegiac, dense, and echoing with internal rhymes, Plimpton is equally at ease creating voices inflected with New York accents, and she delivers perfect pacing when the writing turns quick with dialogue. Listeners will delight in this production. J.C.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
