Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Alice McDermott writes beautiful, understated sentences so subtle and yet so packed with insight that if you blink, you might miss, say, the death of a character, or the realization by another that her grown-up life "would not be the life she had wanted."
McDermott's prose is stunning yet emotionally cool, and it is difficult to care deeply about the Keanes, the middle-class Irish-Catholic family at the heart of After This.
The parents are John and Mary, who find each other in the most innocuous way -- at a coffee shop counter in post-World War II Manhattan.
Soon they have married, moved to a house on Long Island and produced a typical baby-boom brood (two boys, two girls), and they are good parents who neither drink nor fight. Mary's greatest sin is her ambivalence toward her friend Pauline, a "spinster" who is a cross to bear for more than one generation of Keanes.
As the children grow into adolescence, McDermott casts her gaze on seminal moments in their lives. Jacob, Michael, Annie and Clare are roiled by such '70s cataclysms as Vietnam and the uproar over abortion. Perhaps roiled is the wrong word; despite its the-times-they-are-a-changin' backdrop, After This never convincingly captures the generational storm that has gathered on the horizon.
While it fails as a cohesive novel, After This shines in its small moments, much like a story collection.
There are unforgettable vignettes, such as the birth of the Keanes' fourth child, Clare, entering the world on the living room couch with the help of a neighbor, Mr. Persichetti. Or teenage Annie sobbing over the poignancy of A Farewell to Arms as she accompanies her friend to an abortion. Or John Keane, perhaps unwisely, telling his children during a violent thunderstorm that Jacob was named after a young soldier who died fighting Hitler.
Even when her material falls short of her best books (At Weddings and Wakes, the National Book Award-winning Charming Billy), McDermott's talent never fails to impress.
After This
By Alice McDermott
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
279 pp., $24
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
