After This: A Novel

Book Description

Alice McDermott's powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live.

While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother, Jacob, lags behind, until he finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Clare, the youngest child of their aging parents, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. After This, alive with the passions and tragedies of a determining era in our history, portrays the clash of traditional, faith-bound life and modern freedom, while also capturing, with McDermott's inimitable understanding and grace, the joy, sorrow, anger, and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.

Editorial Reviews

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.