Rachel Seiffert’s new novel, “Afterwards,” is a deceptively quiet novel that wants to lure you into believing it’s just a romance – and for about 90 pages, it does a good job at that. A young nurse falls for a house painter in England. Estranged from her biological father, she is wary of easy commitments. The painter holds something back, too. He enjoys her company, but too much of it makes him nervous. Like the woman’s prim, exacting grandfather, he remains aloof, somewhat unknowable. It is as if he has a secret.
But as soon as we start fingering away at that dark lump of the past, the story’s tidy exterior crumbles, revealing a much murkier storyline. Joseph, the painter, is a veteran who served in Northern Ireland. Alice’s grandfather has long held his years as a fighter pilot in Kenya close to his chest. When the two men come together, the protective silences both kept up around Alice begin to break down – bringing relief to one, and fresh trauma to the other. Meanwhile, Alice finds herself more and more on the outside looking in.
Once again, Seiffert has burrowed into the past and cast her eyes upon the shadowy redoubts of guilt and memory. Her mastery of this terrain made her Booker Prize finalist novel, “The Dark Room,” a powerful, haunting debut.
Unlike so many writers of her generation, Seiffert displays an admirable degree of patience – perhaps too much. The first third of this novel unfolds with almost no hint of the darkness that lies beneath some of its characters’ well-managed exteriors.
Joseph and Alice meet at a pub; they see each other three times before sleeping together. Then they do the dance all young couples do between revelation and secrecy: too much information early on feels like desperation. Too little feels dangerous.
Like Pat Barker before her, Seiffert is looking at the similar ways people protect themselves from heartbreak and their own bad deeds. It’s not that the personal is political, but in Seiffert’s eyes the historical is personal, too, something we take for granted in a world of vicarious experience and false identifiers. Thinking about Joseph, Alice wonders: “What did she know about him? He drank Guinness, mostly. He grew up in London, like her, but a bit farther south. His music collection was eclectic: Marvin Gaye, The Jam and Johnny Cash.” Down the line is his service in “the army.”
Seiffert has given herself an unusual problem by staking out this territory. Her characters have to be knowable to us but not to each other. Seiffert solves this quandary by telling “Afterwards” in first- and third-person, the dialogue laid out on the page almost like a transcript. Occasionally, it’s hard to figure out who is speaking – or when. This narrative strategy seems designed to create a mood of recovery, the reader more of a data-miner than a participant. Where is the secret? Where is the clue to why this family’s silences feel so pregnant?
“Afterwards” bravely wants to depict memory as Seiffert sees how it truly works. Information comes at the reader scattershot. Big revelations are buried in mundane talk. As readers, we’re taught to believe if we can just find the nugget of truth maybe all the relationships will become easier. But it’s not that simple, especially when layers of talk and conversation peel back the viscera of Alice’s grandparents’ marriage, and all of Joseph’s secrets have been laid bare. The feeling afterward isn’t of relief, or worse, closure, but rather that maybe a certain degree of not-knowing is essential to love.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
FICTION
Afterwards
By Rachel Seiffert
$24.95
