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After This
On a wild, windy April day in Manhattan, when Mary first meets John Keane, she cannot know what lies ahead of her. A marriage, a fleeting season of romance, and the birth of four children will bring John and Mary to rest in the safe embrace of a traditional Catholic life in the suburbs. But neither Mary nor John, distracted by memories and longings, can feel the wind that...more
Paperback, 288 pages
Published
September 25th 2007
by The Dial Press
(first published September 5th 2006)
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Oct 16, 2011
K.D. Oliveros
rated it
3 of 5 stars
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Angus Miranda
Recommended to K.D. by:
Pulitzer
This is one of those novels that I thought to be a so-so and yet it turned out to be exceptionally good. For me, its strongest suit is the opening scenes. There is no earth-shattering event like atomic bomb or an unforgettable quote but just a description of a woman coming out from a late morning visit to a church to pray. That scene is so vividly described complete with the wind blowing and the and a very detailed account of the church’s steps, the feet of that woman, the sea breeze and the off...more
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This book is unlike any other I have ever read. Her writing style astounded me... throughout the book I had a hard time defining the plot in my mind, yet I knew the book was incredibly well written and the message clear. Moving through the lives of several character, McDermott smoothly uses foreshadowing, repetition, idioms, and symbolism to emphasize various significant points.
This was my first experience reading McDermott, and I must admit I was a little caught off guard. While she moved quic...more
This was my first experience reading McDermott, and I must admit I was a little caught off guard. While she moved quic...more
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Alice McDermott specializes in Irish-American-Catholic suburban life and is a National Book Award winner for her novel Charming Billy.
By the age of thirty Mary was not expected to marry, having settled into life taking care of her father and brother. But contrary to all expectations, the spinster meets and charms John, a war veteran. This novel follows John and Mary Keane and their children through courtship, raising children and enduring loss. When their eldest child goes to Vietnam and never r...more
By the age of thirty Mary was not expected to marry, having settled into life taking care of her father and brother. But contrary to all expectations, the spinster meets and charms John, a war veteran. This novel follows John and Mary Keane and their children through courtship, raising children and enduring loss. When their eldest child goes to Vietnam and never r...more
Alice McDermott has a gentle yet incisive voice and really excels at evoking the feel of a time and place with her narration. One fascinating point of this book is that the most important event is never shown, thus contradicting the "show don't tell" maxim of creative writing. But by the event's very absence, the novel achieves an appropriate mood of absence and recovery.
I had a hard time connecting to this book, and it took me quite a while to finish it; I never really wanted to pick it back up and resume. It was well-written and I appreciated the quiet subtlety of McDermott's writing, but...I don't know. I just never felt that engaged with it.
This book was pretty boring and definitely lacked character developement. Very hard to get into.
I felt this was an absolute waste of time. I abandoned it a little more than halfway through, completely fed up of McDermott's random comments about individual characters... and attempts at creating mystery by only vaguely alluding to certain things (the early birth of Clare, how Mr Keane will eventually die and many more).
Having just read "All The King's Men" which was so beautifully written and all the character development felt relevant and important... "After This" just felt like the uncoor...more
Having just read "All The King's Men" which was so beautifully written and all the character development felt relevant and important... "After This" just felt like the uncoor...more
I fell in love with this author's style of writing on the first page. I don't remember reading anything like it before. I found her way of describing things to be beautiful, soothing and effortless. Reading her work was like gliding over the words. Her style, rather than the story, was what kept me reading this book to the end.
There wasn't anything wrong with the story, there just wasn't anything that I found incredibly compelling. The story follows an Irish Catholic family in the 1950s and 60s...more
There wasn't anything wrong with the story, there just wasn't anything that I found incredibly compelling. The story follows an Irish Catholic family in the 1950s and 60s...more
I’ve had this book well over a year, bought it at Sewanee, where I met the author and liked her a lot. Energetic and witty lady. She’d undertaken the visit of a niece and nephew, children of a fundamentalist sister, in hopes of widening their horizons. She’d promised to avoid corrupting them, not an easy task among a community of artists. She brought them to a reading by a Mississippi writer, an 80-plus lady whose name I should know but no longer recall, just knowing they’d be safe. Said little...more
This is my first Alice McDermott novel. I would like to read another--probably "Charming Billy."
Her writing style takes some getting used to, but once I came to understand her style, it got easier. It appears to jump around (that's OK), but then it also takes some "figuring out" on the reader's part since details are left out. Sometimes you just don't feel like being challenged that way.
This is a story about a middle class Irish Catholic family growing up in Long Island. Mary and John Keane have...more
Her writing style takes some getting used to, but once I came to understand her style, it got easier. It appears to jump around (that's OK), but then it also takes some "figuring out" on the reader's part since details are left out. Sometimes you just don't feel like being challenged that way.
This is a story about a middle class Irish Catholic family growing up in Long Island. Mary and John Keane have...more
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news...
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...more
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...more
I was surprised to be captivated by this book. It was passed on to me with a "not my type of book" comment and sat on my shelf for over a year before I decided to give it a chance. I would describe it as a "quiet" book. It's not as if a lot doesn't happen during the course of these people's (primarily one family's)lives. The characters experience joy, death, war, birth, intimacy, isolation....but, as in our own lives, the lessons from those expereriences are not laid out in black and white. On t...more
I loved it. Love LOVE In fact I will probably read it again soon, immediately after finishing it. This book was just beautiful. Spare but fully observed and it's clear McDermott's heart swells along with her characters-- I felt like I had several genuine moments of revelation throughout this little ordinary novel about a NY Catholic family over several decades. I've read (and enjoyed) most of McDermotts books and this newest is the best. Maybe my favorite contemporary novel. ?
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I spent a year with Charming Billy, by McDermott. It was one of our books for Richmond Reads, a community reading program for the greater Richmond area. It was a good book and it stood up to discussion and re-reading.
To be honest, though, I had not given McDermott much thought since that year. I liked Charming Billy and I had enjoyed That Night which is now a bit dated. A description of After This had crossed my desk and I wondered what her latest book was like. (This is McDermott's latest even...more
To be honest, though, I had not given McDermott much thought since that year. I liked Charming Billy and I had enjoyed That Night which is now a bit dated. A description of After This had crossed my desk and I wondered what her latest book was like. (This is McDermott's latest even...more
Coming up this weekend after I finish "On Chesil Beach". I just read her latest New Yorker story: "Someone" and decided to investigate further. 3(!) Pulitzer nominations...
Day one... Another NY Catholic family saga(like "We Were the Mulvaneys") but this time the family is firmly Long Island Irish Catholic in the 50's and 60's(so far) and less and affluent and successful than their fictional upstate neighbors in Oates' book. The Mulvaneys were a bunch of "stars"(admittedly in a small galaxy). Als...more
Day one... Another NY Catholic family saga(like "We Were the Mulvaneys") but this time the family is firmly Long Island Irish Catholic in the 50's and 60's(so far) and less and affluent and successful than their fictional upstate neighbors in Oates' book. The Mulvaneys were a bunch of "stars"(admittedly in a small galaxy). Als...more
Beautiful words, sentences, and detail. Lovely vignettes from moments in individual lives. But why? Why this family at that time? I struggled to find a narrative thread through the book and I couldn't understand why McDermott had decided that this family were worthy of her words, rather than the neighbour's next door, or the ones down the street.
My other issue with it, is that as the children grow up and some leave home three of them are allowed their own little scenes, in bars, in cars, having...more
My other issue with it, is that as the children grow up and some leave home three of them are allowed their own little scenes, in bars, in cars, having...more
A sad yet hopeful, subtle yet powerful look at a changing time. Alice McDermott's exquisite words take us to a time, those few significant years when children soak it all in– observing and being formed. The novel begins when the roles of men and women are defined, WWII-era parents of big, Catholic families do the best they can, the Church can do no wrong (or at least few admit it with any fervor), and what is considered "PC" then is not the same as today.
Then the 60s happen.
…their father agreed...more
Then the 60s happen.
…their father agreed...more
John and Mary Keane are two loving parents who are devoted to their four children. Like all parents who are raising their children in the mid-century, they want nothing but the best for them so they try to provide a nice, stable home life so that their children can grow up to thrive and be successful. They send their children to private, Catholic schools, attend mass on Sundays, involve themselves in the community by raising money for the church, and are on good terms with their neighbors. But t...more
This novel read like short stores only they were all about the same family. I got a little confused and pictured myself thumbing back through the book to see if I remembered an event or character correctly. Only I was listening to this in my car. I think maybe the author did scramble things up a bit but only because the events were being told from different character's points of view. Also, time flashed forward or backward to give a taste of the whole experience in the space of a short story abo...more
Alice McDermott is a master of realism. Her attention to small details pulls the reader into a character's interior life. Her characters are portrayed realistically: they are fully rounded with strengths and faults, clear motivation and believable reaction. Those are the qualities that work in this book about an Irish American family spanning the decades between the end of World War II and the end of Vietnam. McDermott parallels the changes of society, the changes in the family and the changes i...more
This novel about an Irish-American family's journey through various decades of the 20th century was not terrible but didn't really move me.
The part that I did find poignant is when one of the characters is coming out of the doctor's office after having an abortion, but can't find the friend that she had come with. Finally the friend reappears looking like she's been crying and the one who's had the abortion is sure that the friend is upset about what she's done (they're Catholic schoolgirls) and...more
The part that I did find poignant is when one of the characters is coming out of the doctor's office after having an abortion, but can't find the friend that she had come with. Finally the friend reappears looking like she's been crying and the one who's had the abortion is sure that the friend is upset about what she's done (they're Catholic schoolgirls) and...more
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 so...more
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 provoke
...more
I admire McDermott's writing and her eye for detail, but ultimately this book felt more like a collection of interwoven short stories than a novel.
There isn't a protagonist--unless the family itself is the protagonist--which makes it hard to settle in and really invest in the characters. The shifting POV, even within a single scene, also makes it difficult for the reader to invest. Additionally, the level of detail on characters who appear briefly and are never seen again confused me. I kept ex...more
There isn't a protagonist--unless the family itself is the protagonist--which makes it hard to settle in and really invest in the characters. The shifting POV, even within a single scene, also makes it difficult for the reader to invest. Additionally, the level of detail on characters who appear briefly and are never seen again confused me. I kept ex...more
Chapters briefly illuminate various members of the Keane family’s lives from post-World War II through the 1970’s. Standout passages are keen portrayals of individuals, their interactions, and their choices in response to a variety of events: kind, perceptive Mary’s journey from aging virgin to wife and mother of four; the sibling rivalry between sensitive Jacob and brash younger brother Michael; the small moments between friends and neighbors in a suburban, Catholic, Long Island community. Deat...more
This has to be the most compelling novel I've ever read in which almost nothing happens. "After This" feels more like a series of vignettes, or linked short stories. It describes several decades in the lives of the Keane family - from the parents' meeting through when their children reach adulthood. Each chapter is told from a different family member's perspective.
The book progresses from the late 40s through the 1960s and McDermott does a wonderful job evoking the feelings and realities of tho...more
The book progresses from the late 40s through the 1960s and McDermott does a wonderful job evoking the feelings and realities of tho...more
Thought this book was much better than her more highly acclaimed work - Charming Billy, but that's just me.
That said, her writing just seems to flow: "During the war, their mother lit a candle for the boys on her lunch hour, at St. Agnes or up at St. Patrick's, and of course Pauline knew she did this without anyone ever having to tell her so, and although Pauline was estranged from the church - it had to do with something some nun had said - she nevertheless began to tag along. And how could yo...more
That said, her writing just seems to flow: "During the war, their mother lit a candle for the boys on her lunch hour, at St. Agnes or up at St. Patrick's, and of course Pauline knew she did this without anyone ever having to tell her so, and although Pauline was estranged from the church - it had to do with something some nun had said - she nevertheless began to tag along. And how could yo...more
I'm quite surprised by a lot of the reviews I've read on here. I was completely enchanted by this book and yet, I can't in hindsight pinpoint why I fell so completely under it's spell. I can only chalk up to the style of writing and how gorgeously Alice McDermott writes. I felt like I was savoring a delicious meal. Time magazine called the book "Strangely haunting" and I think that perfectly sums up my feelings. The descriptions of people, places and things were so vivid that I could picture eve...more
Another one for the "books I bailed on" series. "After this" by Alice McDermott isn't even a long book by most standards. Yet, I still could not stomach any more of it. At this time, it's difficult to pinpoint what exactly turned me off from this story. It focused on a boring woman who ages with her boring husband and then eventually they will have kids and those children become the central focus of the novel. That is the framework of the story, from what I could gather in other reviews and the...more
Had I not been listening to this one in the car I may have not stayed with it as it was not one of my favorites, but I did want to know what happened to the children as they became adults. John and Mary Keane, both very Catholic, raise a family during the Vietnam Era. The perspective shifts amongst the family members, who also include Mary's friend from work who becomes an "aunt" of sorts to the 3 children, two boys and a girl. It is a somewhat slow moving story of family events, but is written...more
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| After This | 3 | 21 | Mar 12, 2009 04:52am |
Alice McDermott (born June 27, 1953) is Johns Hopkins University's Writer-in-Residence. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, Long Island, NY [1967], Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead NY [1971], the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975, and later received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.
She has taught at the UC...more
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“It was not the future they'd been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could now have one without the other”
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2 people liked it
“She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take”
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1 person liked it
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