Readers who discovered her debut novel. “The Bigamist’s Daughter” in 1982, and subsequent titles, know Alice McDermott (“Child of My Heart,” “Charming Billy”) is a writer with abilities both natural and supernatural. Her quirky characters are swept along on rivers of clean, well-crafted prose. Those same characters face down issues of epic proportions in the confines of a kitchen, a confessional, a living room or a front yard.
McDermott’s novels are microcosms of domestic life – with a twist of strange lemons or salty limes – from the editor who investigates her father’s fidelity in “The Bigamist’s Daughter” to the abandoned and hidden love at the heart of the National Book Award-winning “Charming Billy.” In the case of “After This,” the subject is generational conflict and the loss of dreams, as the children of a World War II couple clash with traditional beliefs in an effort to define their own lives.
Though the book and its chapters are short, “After This” is long on storytelling as McDermott relates the lives of John and Mary Keane, who marry not long after the war comes to an end, and their four children.
Still living with her parents and certain that she is headed for life as a spinster – her daily thoughts are filled with nostalgia for past boyfriends and desire for men she has yet to know – Mary stumbles into a relationship with John, and just as suddenly into marriage. Though she is relatively happy, Mary finds herself pregnant with their first child and filled with bitter sweetness when confronted with how life and marriage really work: “This was something she had never anticipated before she was married, the painful, physical struggle he seemed to wage with himself in the course of their joining. She had thought it would all be whispered endearments, only pleasantly breathless.”
McDermott’s prose flows from chapters detailing the lives of parents who grew up believing in the American Dream to chapters following the coming of age of their children as Michael, Annie, Jacob and Claire confront the sea-change of the 1960s, including the sexual revolution and Vietnam War.
One son goes off to war while the younger son and eldest daughter dive headfirst into the sexual revolution and college culture. The youngest child, Claire, seems to be attempting to walk the path of Catholic saints she learned of in church, believing every word and lesson the sometimes bitter nuns teach her.
“After This” isn’t for readers in search of a mindless thriller; on the other hand, McDermott’s well- crafted prose and the short, vignette style of each chapter keep the narrative flowing briskly, no small accomplishment, given that the author jumps back and forth in time, relating moments of domestic bliss and strife in the life of John and Mary Keane, then jumping forward in time to reveal the future of one or more of the couple’s children.
Sometimes, as with Annie and Michael and Claire’s experiences, McDermott is explicit in her storytelling. At other times, as when eldest son Jacob goes off to war in Vietnam, she wields memory and allegory like a poet’s pen.
The details of Jacob’s experience aren’t related verbatim: They are, rather, reflected upon and hinted at through scenes from his past (as he “plays war” with other boys) or from family history (Jacob’s grandfather and namesake fought in World War I). Although only time will decide the standing of McDermott’s latest in the American literary canon, this sort of narrative conceit works beautifully and is one of the reasons “After This,” a novel about the intersection of dreams and reality, is lifted that much closer to the realm of art.
It would be easy for the sake of readers looking for some sort of landmark to pigeonhole McDermott by saying she writes the sort of fiction popularized by Anne Tyler or, more accurately, Mary Gordon. But McDermott’s abilities are such that she long ago developed her own voice, and the third-person narrative in “After This” lends the novel the sort of bigger-than-life quality found in all the best books.
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelance writer from Missouri.
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After This
By Alice McDermott
Henry Holt, 384 pages, $26
