Product Description

For twelve years Carson Blake inhabited a world of his own creation. Scorned by the father who was incapable of showing him affection and nearly consumed by the mean streets of Prince George’s County, Maryland, Carson did what no one else could: he saved himself.

After joining the police force and building a family with his wife, Bunny, Carson is finally in control of his life in the enclave where African American wealth and privilege shares the same zip code with black American crime and tragedy. Both Carson and his wife have great careers and three beautiful children: Roslyn, Roseanne, and Juwan. Carson is a devoted father, determined not to be the father that Jimmy Blake was to him. But while Juwan’s astounding artistic talent is his father’s pride, the boy’s close relationship with classmate Will conjures up emotions and questions in Carson that threaten to spill over and poison the entire Blake family.

And then, one night in March, nearing the end of a routine shift, Carson stops a young black man for speeding. He orders Paul Houston to exit the car and drop to his knees. But when Houston retrieves something from his waistband and turns to face Carson, three shots are fired, one man loses his life and two families are wrenched from everything that came before and hurled into the haunting future of everything that will come after. When it is revealed that Paul, a son of educators and a teacher in Southeast D.C., was only holding a cell phone, Carson’s carefully woven world begins to unravel.

After is a penetrating work of discovery for a man whose life careens more than once off the edge of disaster. Golden’s astounding prose will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1410587 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-16
• Released on: 2006-05-16
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The author of half a dozen books on race, both fiction and nonfiction, Golden tackles the subject from a different perspective in her latest novel about a black policeman who kills an innocent young black man. Thinking the driver he just pulled over is reaching for a gun, Maryland police officer Carson Blake shoots first. But what Carson thought was a gun turns out to be a cellphone. Carson; his wife, Bunny; and their three children struggle through the aftermath as Golden explores the baggage that comes with the badge for a black family man. The story has potential, but Golden's flat prose and bloodless dialogue drain it. She does offer some studied insight into a fraught dynamic, but the novel as a whole is standard and sentimental. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
As the title implies, Marita Golden's new novel, After, concerns the effects of a seminal event: Carson Blake, a black police officer, mistakenly shoots a 25-year-old black school teacher, the son of university professors. The novel wastes little time getting to that event; the first sentence explodes with it. Thereafter, Golden, who is best known for her nonfiction narratives exploring racial identity, including Migrations of the Heart and Don't Play in the Sun, ably walks the line between predictable morality tale and compelling personal journey.

Prior to the shooting, Carson is entrenched in the routines of middle class life: work, family and home. Work is the problem. A veteran police officer in suburban D.C., he laments the "aimless, directionless" congregations of black youths, who "can turn any place into a ghetto." At a recent shooting, he finds a young black male "dressed in spanking new jeans, two-hundred-dollar Air Jordans, and a Phat Farm sweatshirt . . . dead." Golden's spare, poetic prose, in the present tense, shows Carson patroling with rising frustration: "God damn, my people, my people," he thinks, "envisioning the future of the race in every act and every choice these young men make." He has tried to talk to them, "but he might as well be speaking Mandarin."

By himself, Carson is compelling and believable, particularly for his shortcomings, which are enacted without the kind of authorial judgment that would undermine the narrative. Golden skillfully weaves past and present together, effectively expressing her main character's internal battle. But Carson isn't by himself in this story, and therein lies some difficulty.

The pivotal incident occurs around midnight, at the end of Carson's shift, when a black Nissan speeds past with its lights off. The driver fails to pull over initially and appears, to Carson at least, to be evading arrest. When the car finally does stop, Carson draws his gun and orders the man to kneel. Events unfold with a dreadful inevitability:

"Carson begins to approach the kneeling man when he sees him drop his left hand and reach inside his waistband. . . . The quick, small movement chills the night and freezes Carson's blood." The driver turns and rises swiftly, reaching toward him with something, a gun perhaps. In a pulsing moment of fear and desperation, Carson shoots. The man and the cell phone he was holding drop to the pavement. Carson's mind swirls with hallucinatory horror, his question looming over the body of Paul Houston: "Why didn't you just do what I said?"

For two-thirds of the novel, we are left to guess at the answer. By the time we find out, the explanation seems insufficient. Not Houston's rattled state of mind over personal troubles, not even the possibility that the phone started vibrating to signal an incoming call seems to account for his inability to recognize the gravity of the moment: A cop with a loaded weapon was yelling at him. Houston's actions, while necessary for the story, signal the primary challenge of Golden's subject: For Carson to feel the guilt that forces him to change, Houston must be innocent, but to maintain sympathy for Carson, Houston must reasonably appear to be guilty. Trying to maintain these two positions creates the novel's fundamental weakness.

Perhaps for this reason, Golden keeps us in Carson's mind, as if Houston's actions don't really matter. We feel the cop is misunderstood, convicted in the minds of most of his friends, to some degree by his own family, and most of all, by himself. The legal realities are no consolation: Administrative leave isolates him; his union lawyer is interested only in saving Carson's job, not finding the truth; and only Carson's street-hardened colleagues offer any understanding; yet their approval is suspicious at best. Carson must fight the terrible inertia to become like them -- cynical, uncaring, a danger to public safety.

Only through therapy does Golden reveal the underlying causes of his self-loathing, a device that is realistic but lacks drama and leads to a somewhat tidy resolution. Carson's wife, driven by her need to protect her family, wields psychological insights with uncanny precision, and Carson's recognition of his own prejudices, particularly relating to his son's ambiguous sexuality, gives an uneasy sense of moral and political contrivance.

Yet for all these difficulties, Carson redeems not only himself, but the novel, too. Despite missteps with secondary characters and a case-study kind of plotting, there's no denying Golden's empathy for her main character and her willingness to push him into dark places of self-recrimination. As an angry, ever more hardening cop, Carson can and must change. While there is little surprise in the purposeful resolution of the story, the understated humility inherent in his personal evolution is hard to dismiss, if only for its fundamental rightness.

Reviewed by David Masiel
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Carson Blake is a confident Maryland police officer in his mid-30s. He is struggling with the cynical life cycle of young black men--being a product of that experience and having the responsibility to "serve and protect" the larger community. His fairly comfortable life is drastically changed when a routine traffic stop results in his use of deadly force against an unarmed black man, a schoolteacher whose professor parents live within the general area where Blake's family lives. Obsessed with guilt about the shooting, Blake misses his son's struggle with sexual awareness and gender identification. His wife, Bunny, labors to save Blake from going off the deep end and balance his need to do right by his victim's family and his own. Golden deftly portrays the life-altering consequences of an unfortunate act, the threats to Blake's family and the victim's. But she also artfully reflects on police brutality from inside the black middle class, where neither affluence nor good intentions offer sufficient protection. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

How tragedy affects us...
Sometimes in life we don't appear to have a problem going from day to day, but in the crevices of our mind, pains of the past haunt us, affecting us in an unconscious sort of way. The emotional impact of events can make us into better people or break us down to our lowest levels. In AFTER by Marita Golden, we see an established family living in the near perfect world they've attained and enjoying life, or at least it seems that way.

But, for Carson Blake, a local black police officer in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., things come to a standstill when he pulls over a young black man during the end of his nightly shift. Though justified, since the driver is speeding and isn't using his headlights, Carson apprehends him, but doesn't expect the young man to reach inside his waistband; nor does he expect to fire shots, but he does. Later, he notices the man had reached for a cell phone. He has killed an unarmed man in an attempt to protect himself.

AFTER follows the aftermath of the fatal shooting, for both families, but focuses mostly on Carson and his wife Bunny and how they deal with the situation--how the accident impacts their lives. As they struggle through the feelings of being powerless, the reader is given a glimpse of the other family and their views. It is a tragedy that affects all of them, making each question their lives, the what-ifs, and more. Why didn't the young man just follow orders?

AFTER opens up the door for dialogue on many topics and themes, some of which are guilt and redemption. What I liked about this book was that it centered around how a split-second decision affected the characters emotionally. Carson's character was raw and almost naked as he faced what was an accident, but ended up being something he never fully got over. I also liked that the book opened with the immediate conflict and for the most part stayed focused on Carson, not just the fact that he was a policeman, but that he was also a victim to his past and emotions. The burdens, responsibilities, and human characteristics we each have are all forefront in this novel making AFTER an absorbing and thought-provoking read.

Reviewed by Tee C. Royal
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

What comes next?
The members of Turning Pages Book Club, unanimously state that they enjoy the writing style of author, Marita Golden, but there were mixed view points in terms of the book,"After"
The sensitive subject of the shooting and killing of another "black man" by a policeman, especially a black cop did not fair well.
"After", the shooting incident, which gives Carson, a chance to reflect through therapy on his troubled childhood and life up until his marriage, on some unresolved issues. The one main issue that kept surfacing was his unresolved problems(self-esteem issues), which stemmed from being raised by an unloving man (Jimmy Blake),whom he thought was his father until he was told at the age of 16,that he wasn't and about his Mother's affair.
The shooting incident causes Carson Blake to re-evaluate his whole life from his childhood up until the shooting. As a final result he decides to write to the parents of the young man he shot,(Paul Houston), who came from a upper-middle class background, who was doing something positive with his life as a school teacher.
The story goes into detail about the emotional affects for both families "after" the shooting which kept the story flowing because the reader is able to embrace the remorse that Carson feels and how it almost destroys him to the point of attempting to take his own life, then to the struggles that his family goes through as a result. The story goes into great detail to describe the varying emotions that the victims(Paul) parents go through;from trying to sue, to emotional shut down,anger,pain,unforgiving, wanting revenge to finally forgiving Carson was very well executed by Ms. Golden in a manner that makes the reader feel like part of the story as an observer. In this position, the reader starts to deliberate on the out come of the meeting between Carson and Mrs. Houston before she decides to actually meet with him because the outcome is so crucial to the ending of the story.
This was a very well written story with a lot of emotion.

Another Golden Nugget!
The plight of the black man has never been as magnified as it is in recent times. Albeit, and with much fanfare, there have been a plethora of books detailing the ills but rarely solutions. Now comes a brilliant story told from the imaginative mind of erudite scribe, Marita Golden with a book entitled, AFTER. This, her latest offering delves into the life of Carson Blake fighting demons that threaten to consume him lest a plan of salvation can be part of saving grace. Urban angst, coupled with dysfunctional familial life can wreck havoc and leave scars that are definitive of years of strife. Much should be said about the brilliance of illuminating light when a stand is made for challenge and change. Blake's stupendous effort to do just that makes this novel worth reading for redeeming value and for the mere triumphant nature of another black man pulled up from the depths of despair.

For starters, Carson Blake is not a victim of sympathy; he inhabited circumstances that would have served him favorably had he made better decisions, and chose the right people for influence. Dismissed by an incorrigible father who was incapable of showing him affection, and given an early baptism in the mean streets of Prince George's County, Maryland, Carson endeavored to challenge the system and change his life. He married, became a police officer, and attempted to model his life for meaningful mantras. Not to bask in the idyllic life of change, bile comes to fore in the form of son Juwan facing problems of his own within his peer group, despite talents that clearly appear to be the greater of his whole. The story is a moderate moving work of fiction that allows the author freedom to tackle prominent issues on the face of family, race, love and identity. In my opinion, this is the best of her five books to date because it allowed me to feel as if I was closer to the action. I was able to identify, as I'm familiar with a lot of what is depicted here. How can you not feel pride and rejuvenation when Carson shows characteristics of a devoted father, determined not to be the father that his father was to him?

The turning point of this story comes alive when Ms Golden truly defines the nature of guilt, redemption, and forgiveness for Carson and his family. To wit: Carson makes a traffic stop, only to have the young black man turn as if to make an assault. The situation goes awry as Carson shoots in self-defense. When the smoke clears one man loses his life and two families are caught up in the emotional hand wringing of conjecture, accusation, acrimony, and second-guessing. Adding insult to injury, Paul Houston, the son of a middle class family of educators was only holding a cell phone. Carson's carefully woven world of change begins to come apart. I found this book to be a deep study into some of the same things that are happening, and have happened over a period of time in our communities that will give this work something for someone to embrace for their own chance at change. The open-ended conclusion gives much to the imagination and colors the outcome one that readers can add their own hues. Marita Golden has done it again, with all the belief that she just gets better with time! Buy this book and know that the Carson Blakes of this world can find salvation where redeeming value is imminent.