After You'd Gone

published	February 26th 2002 by Penguin (Non-Classics)
binding	Paperback
isbn	0142000329 (isbn13: 9780142000328)
pages	384
description	Alice is a young woman who is returning to Scotland to reunite with her family. She meets her family at Waverley Station, but a strange incident happe...more [close] Alice is a young woman who is returning to Scotland to reunite with her family. She meets her family at Waverley Station, but a strange incident happens. After seeing something horrible in a mirror at the station, she gets on the next train to London. Later that day, her family goes to a London hospital where Alice lies in a coma. The family argues about whether or not it was a suicide attempt. In Maggie O’Farrell’s gripping novel After You’d Gone, Alice, while in a coma, begins taking stock of her life and a recent love affair. [close]
date added	04-19-07 edit book

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Did Alice live or die?	1	04/17/2008 11:41AM

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Cam rated it:

04/13/08

Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: suckers for character development, those looking for a wholly original read

I picked up this book after it was passionately recommended to me by an avid reader; I had never heard of Maggie O'Farrell and wasn't quite sure what to expect from the description on the back. Was it a mystery? A love story? An artsy character study?

Actually, it was all three. The book is centered on the story of Alice, a 20-something Londoner who is painted as a quiet, astute observer with a wicked sense of humor and a magnetic presence. The crux is her relationship with John Friedmann, a ...more I picked up this book after it was passionately recommended to me by an avid reader; I had never heard of Maggie O'Farrell and wasn't quite sure what to expect from the description on the back. Was it a mystery? A love story? An artsy character study?

Actually, it was all three. The book is centered on the story of Alice, a 20-something Londoner who is painted as a quiet, astute observer with a wicked sense of humor and a magnetic presence. The crux is her relationship with John Friedmann, a cerebral but very likable newspaper reporter, and from this center, the story pulses outward into Alice's family history, as far back as her grandmother's girlhood. O'Farrell employs shifting viewpoints in telling her story: sometimes it's told in third-person vignettes of individual characters, and sometimes in the first person of any one of them: Alice's mother, grandmother, John, and Alice herself. The viewpoint changes with varying frequency, and the story it tells is not linear but threaded together in what sometimes seems to be a haphazard fashion but, in the end, isn't at all.

The book opens with the classic main-character-sleepwalking-through-life story: something has happened to Alice, but we don't yet know what it is. She is suspended in the dark depths of sadness, oblivious to the world going on around her. She takes an unplanned trip home to Scotland one day, where she sees something so upsetting in the train station that she turns around and returns straight to London, where she promptly steps in front of a bus and is slammed into a coma. We're never told if it was intentional or not (though the book's other characters generally believe that it was), even during first-person sections from Alice herself. Up to this point, I wavered a bit; the train station scene, when she sees this unknown image that upsets her so much, seemed a bit out of nowhere and overly dramatic, and the beginning premise wasn't all that original. I couldn't yet tell if Alice was going to be an insufferable annoyance or a sympathetic character. What made me stick with it was O'Farrell's gift for imagery--I could see, smell, and feel the things she described in a way that I rarely experience with books.

As the story bore on and the viewpoints started to shift, I was completely drawn in. I know everyone has different criteria for determining what makes an excellent book, and for me, it's the character development. I don't even need much of a plot if the characters are richly drawn; I still miss the characters in most of my favorite books as if they were real people in my life. This was one of those books, and what was most impressive about it was that I didn't see it coming. There weren't many literal, descriptive passages about the characters, and when it came down to it, I didn't really have a "fact sheet" on any of them, even at the end of the book. I got to know these characters in the same way I get to know people in real life: by hearing their stories, watching the way they interact and respond to different settings and situations, and learning about them through one another's perspectives. It felt like O'Farrell created such vivid, multidimensional characters simply by letting them speak through her. They were surprising, complicated, and not always likable, but they were very, very real.

I was particularly intrigued by Alice's mother, Ann, a strangely cold, emotionless personality. I was really impressed with the way O'Farrell avoided making her a totally alienating character--she's not likable, but there's an intense, and intensely sad, humanness just beneath her steely exterior that didn't have to be there--a lesser author would have stopped short.

My willing ride along the unpredictable currents of this book was tempered only by O'Farrell's depiction of her male characters. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I couldn't buy the desperate, obsessive, I-can't-live-without-you throes of love every man in Alice's life seemed to be thrust into within minutes of meeting her. I got that Alice had a bewitching presence about her, but the scenes between her and her suitors--especially those first few meetings with John--were a bit much. I found myself rolling my eyes and thinking, "Give me a break."

But O'Farrell's ability to paint her characters and their relationships with such emotion and depth made After You'd Gone an unforgettable book, and an absolutely beautiful, heartbreaking, perfect ending sealed the deal for me. I highly recommend for those who want an engrossing (and therefore relatively quick) read, or for those who, like me, love to get washed away in nostalgia for their favorite written characters....less

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After You'd Gone

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