Product Description

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 is buffeting their children, leading them in directions beyond their parents’ control. Michael and his sister Annie are caught up in the sexual revolution. Jacob, brooding and frail, is drafted to Vietnam. And the youngest, Clare, commits a stunning transgression after a childhood spent pleasing her parents. As John and Mary struggle to hold on to their family and their faith, Alice McDermott weaves an elegant, unforgettable portrait of a world in flux–and of the secrets and sorrows, anger and love, that lie at the heart of every family.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71803 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-25
• Released on: 2007-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A master at capturing Irish-Catholic American suburban life, particularly in That Night (1987) and the National Book Award–winning Charming Billy (1998), McDermott returns for this sixth novel with the Keane family of Long Island, who get swept up in the wake of the Vietnam War. When John and Mary Keane marry shortly after WWII, she's on the verge of spinsterhood, and he's a vet haunted by the death of a young private in his platoon. Jacob, their first-born, is given the dead soldier's name, an omen that will haunt the family when Jacob is killed in Vietnam (hauntingly underplayed by McDermott). In vignette-like chapters, some of which are stunning set pieces, McDermott probes the remaining family's inner lives. Catholic faith and Irish heritage anchor John and Mary's feelings, but their children experience their generation's doubt, rebellion and loss of innocence: next eldest Michael, who had always dominated Jacob, drowns his guilt and regret in sex and drugs; Anne quits college and moves to London with a lover; Clare, a high school senior, gets pregnant. The story of '60s and '70s suburbia has been told before, and McDermott has little to say about the Vietnam War itself. But she flawlessly encapsulates an era in the private moments of one family's life. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School—John and Mary Keane, good Irish Catholics raising four children and sharing their lively family with a spinster "aunt," feel the impact of the 1960s on their family: the sudden freedom of the sexual revolution, the controversy and tragedy of the Vietnam War, and the growing irreverence of popular culture. Their story, which spans the years from the end of World War II to the 1970s, is as ordinary as it is compelling and as suspenseful as it is inevitable. The characters are so human and sympathetic that readers can barely leave them on the last page. The narrative unfolds in economical yet rich language, using flashbacks and foreshadowing to provide insight into characters, hints at world events, and exquisite images. The story is episodic: the meeting and marriage of Mary and John, outings at the ocean, a frightening storm and a fallen tree, the death of their firstborn in Vietnam, the pregnancy of an unmarried daughter, the renovation of the neighborhood church. These mostly ordinary events become extraordinary in the telling, making this a fine read for teens who appreciate family stories.—Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.

Customer Reviews

Ordinary People
Alice McDermott is a good writer. She casts a wise and loving eye over her turf, the suburban New York City Irish Catholic scene during the baby boom years. In several books, especially Charming Billy, she successfully evokes the humor and pathos of her chosen people. She's particularly good on the bonds of family, the ways in which fealty to one's tribe can simultaneously prop up and chafe a soul.

Unfortunately, After This is not one of her better novels. It's not even a novel, actually, but a series of linked episodes about the Keane family as they make their non-reflective way from the fifties to the seventies. This structure can work, and has, back to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which used a series of small moments in small lives to say something profound about a place and a time. But the episodes in After This are too elliptical to build upon, and the fractured structure becalms the plot.

McDermott has set herself the challenge of writing something interesting about determinedly average people. Mother Mary has almost resigned herself to spinsterhood when she meets John, an older WW II veteran, at a lunch counter in Manhattan. They marry, move to the suburbs, create four children. The oldest, Jacob is a tender, often feckless boy. His younger brother Michael, more wised-up and aggressive, torments Jacob throughout their childhood. Bookish Annie stands in for the aspiring intellectuals in blue collar families, and baby Clare is a simpler girl, beloved by all. Because McDermott leaps from person to person, we don't spend enough time with any one of the Keanes to become invested in their doings. The most sympathetic character in the book is Mary's friend Pauline. Pauline at least has a feisty, resentful attitude toward the world she lives in, which lends poignancy to her late-life breakdown.

This is a book of small moments. The big events - WWII and Vietnam, the love affairs and accidental pregnancies - happen offstage. We get the reverberations in the lives of the Keanes, but it's hard to sympathize with such passive people. Take Jacob getting drafted as a perfect example. It's 1970, and he draws a low draft number. There's no real debate about whether he'll go to Vietnam, which is odd in itself, since most young men of his age and intelligence debated this endlessly. We don't see his decision-making or learn how he feels about the war; he's simply swept away on the tide of government policy. He's surrendered before the first shot is fired, which makes it hard to work up the requisite pity for the bad fate that befalls him.

The hard-bitten Catholicism of the Irish provides the background music of this book. Since the Church and the Parish are so central to the Keanes, it's logical for the reader to wonder whether McDermott sees Catholicism as a good or bad force in their lives. Even though there are scenes of confession and communion, priestly musings and absolutions, and a nun's anti-feminist rant, you'll finish the novel still wondering. The Keanes treat Catholicism like the weather: something to accept or avoid, but not to question.

There are two good set pieces in the middle of the book, which would have worked equally well as standalone short stories. One involves Michael getting drawn into the social scene at an oddball bar near his upstate New York campus, which is his way of rebelling against the humdrum life he sees lined up in front of him like another shot of cheap whiskey. The other is a funny send-up of British academia during Annie's year abroad. And there are specific passages that achieve a quiet grace, including a lovely scene about grace itself that happens right at the end of the book during Clare's wedding.

If you came of age in the New York area during the Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson years, you can read After This for the way McDermott's precise prose evokes the sense memory of that time - like pawing through the old Polaroids someone in the family tucked away in a drawer. If you're looking for new insights about the era, or to be swept up in the drama of an Irish American family wrestling with its fate, look elsewhere.

After Reading This
I thought this was a marvelous little gem. It's a novel that's formed by the interconnection of several stories about the Keane family (and isn't that really what life is all about...interconnected stories?) This is an "ordinary" family: one son goes to Vietnam, another goes off to college, a daughter travels to London for her education, another stays home (no spoiler). But it's in their very ordinariness that this book shines.

I get tired of reviews from readers who can't enjoy a book without an adventure-a-minute plot. There IS a place for books like that, but this is not one of them. It's a character-based book, and the characters come alive. I feel as if I know every single one of them; as if they could have been my next door neighbors or the family down the block.

Some say Alice McDermott is a "Catholic writer." I was never brainwashed with religion like some; I see her as a universal writer. The religion here is a backdrop to the lives of the characters; something that gives their life structure and community, but not necessarily meaning. They have to find the meaning within themselves.

The writing is so powerful -- and authentic -- that I re-read passages just to review the author's construction of sentences. I will not easily forget the family members that populated this book.

Moving and Beautiful
You didn't have to grow up Catholic, like the families in this book, to identify entirely with its story. You just had to be there.

For those of us whose childhoods intersected with the "Sixties" as popular culture understands it, the shock of being raised one way (e.g., wearing white gloves to a department store; dressing up to go to the movies) with a deep and constant value system--and having that system completely ridiculed, turned upside down and labeled obsolete in just a few tumultuous years, was all too real, and is memorably described in this book.

Here, we meet the Keanes, good, decent middle-class devout Catholics who raise their four children around their church, Catholic school, and all the social values that come with that lifestyle. There is no divorce. There is no abortion (at least as far as these people understand life). Vietnam is a faraway and uninteresting place. And then, seemingly overnight, everything changes.

We see the four Keane children, two boys and two girls, encounter every cliche of the Sixties, except that if you lived it, it was all too real: unwanted pregnancy, unwanted draft into the horrible Vietnam War, sex without love or any commitment, drugs -- the litany is endless. Even the Keanes' beloved church is "modernized" to the point that it no longer seems a church.

Some of the characters survive, able to accept the changes and act accordingly. Others do not. All makes perfect sense.

I have ordered this book for a dear friend who DID grow up Catholic, but that is not a prerequisite to experiencing this wonderful, special book. Highly recommended.