The work of Alice McDermott has proved quite polarizing among America’s reading community. Some think she’s one of the most accomplished novelists at work today, others think she’s an Anne-Tyler-wannabe hack. I am not here to subscribe to either of these camps. I am here to review a unique and unusual book called After This.
Even those who hate her novels usually admit: Alice McDermott has a ton of raw talent. For me, this made After This worthwhile. The environments are fully realized, thought the characters for the most part are not. I actually liked this. Rather than give us every minuscule detail about her characters, McDermott chooses to be an observer, giving us a fully and poetically described setting and documenting how these people move around within it; and allowing us to judge if we like them or not based on that and that alone. McDermott has a skill that most authors would kill for: she is a virtuoso with subtlety.
As with The Catcher in the Rye, I did not “like” most of the characters I encountered in After This. McDermott doesn’t want us to feel for or pity her characters. She merely wants to tell us what happened. There is no moral, just pure humanity. After This strips plot down to its barest essentials—cause and effect. I definitely understand why many readers find this frustrating to read.
What is the plot? After This is basically the story of a normal family in the baby boomer era, watching their children spiral out of control. I have no problem revealing plot elements to you. This novel is about the writing, not necessarily any plot. Two of the older children leap right into the psychedelic movement. Michael indulges freely in alcohol and a number of idiot friends. Annie goes off to an esteemed college, and encounters the free love community. Jacob is drafted into Vietnam, where he is killed in action. One of the book’s greatest accomplishments is that Jacob’s death is merely implied throughout by his disappearance and a very subtle change in tone. And there is Clare, the youngest and most symbolic character. Her life begins on her living room couch, when her mother suddenly begins labor and delivers her baby with the help of their neighbor Mr. Persichetti. The book ends with Clare herself pregnant and about to marry her boyfriend. There is no resolution. We never find out “what happens”.
In many respects, the book is insensitive and uncomfortable. An abortion scene racked my body with sickening chills. Thankfully not too much surgical detail is given, but the descriptions of the cold steel are enough. The hippie life is not romanticized. Michael’s friends are never portrayed as anything more than oversexed lowlife losers. Another major literary accomplishment in the novel is that McDermott renders the reader almost completely unaware of just how much time passes. Only by the end did I realize that the girl who wasn’t even born at the beginning was now nineteen and with her own child.
The book also contains some very beautiful and witty passages. The description of Mrs. Keane and the young Clare standing in line to see Michelangelo’s Piétà is almost perfectly written. The barely described abortion manages to be so disturbing that its power alone could be an effective tool against the Roe v. Wade tragedy. The description of a windstorm at the beginning as “worthy of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton” is one of the more sophisticated quotes, and a clever description of a nun holding her finger under three light switches “as if to keep three tiny noses from sneezing” shows McDermott’s interesting sense of observational humor. It could be seen as self-effacingly pretentious by some. I don’t think so. Alice McDermott simply isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. She doesn’t even attempt to be. It is this quality in her writing that I deeply respect. She is absolutely fearless, but too intelligent to go in for shock tactics.
It’s hard to say that Alice McDermott has really achieved something major here. At the same time, it’s impossible to say that she hasn’t. I can’t say that I “love” the book, and I am not necessarily “recommending” it. Like McDermott herself, I can only say what happens in this novel and how it has affected me. And it has definitely affected me. Similar to Eudora Welty, McDermott is a writer for multilevel thinkers. The more I think about it, it makes perfect sense why many can’t stand her.
