After This: A Novel

After This: A Novel
by Alice McDermott

After This: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Alice McDermott
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2006-09-05
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Book Reviews of After This: A Novel

Book Review: A mighty wind blows through it
Summary: 2 Stars

I really enjoyed "Charming Billy" and looked forward to this novel, especially after all the glowing reviews in the press. But seriously, that wind started a'blowin' on page one and kept on for the next 80 pages or so. Blowing people and their lives randomly into the unknowable future. In case you didn't get the meaning of the wind, its spelled out on the back cover. The wind finally lets up and turns to rain -right when people start crying (raindrops =tear drops, get it? Ms. McDermott even explains it for you in case you missed it). Somehow what seemed like a promising novel turned into an Iowa Writers Workshop assignment.

Yes, the woman can write but I don't know what happened here. This is really a sub par effort. Maybe charting two generations of an Irish Catholic family on Long Island from the post WW II era through the turbulent 60s and 70s in 280 pages was overly ambitious. The first 100 pages I found relatively uninteresting but I persevered based on her reputation. The middle section was the best but once I realized that she was just going to finish out the novel with set pieces about each child (with their eventual future telescoped parenthetically), my interest waned and disappointment set in. As other reviewers have noted, this really isn't a novel. Its also not a bad effort. More like something from Oprahs book club that will be made into a movie for the Oxygen network. The real problem is the abundance of good writers competing for readers' diminishing free time. After This, Ms. McDermott just dropped down on my priority list.

Summary of After This: A Novel

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.

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