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Jenny Shank's Reviews > After This
After This
by Alice McDermott
by Alice McDermott
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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.
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